Extending Human–Robot Relationships Based in Music With Virtual Presence

Social relationships between humans and robots require both long term engagement and a feeling of believability or social presence toward the robot. It is our contention that music can provide the extended engagement that other open-ended interaction studies have failed to do, also, that in combination with the engaging musical interaction, the addition of simulated social behaviors is necessary to trigger this sense of believability or social presence. Building on previous studies with our robot drummer Mortimer that show including social behaviors can increase engagement and social presence, we present the results of a longitudinal study investigating the effect of extending weekly collocated musical improvisation sessions by making Mortimer an active member of the participant's virtual social network. Although, we found the effects of extending the relationship into the virtual world were less pronounced than results we have previously found by adding social modalities to human-robot musical interaction, interesting questions are raised about the interpretation of our automated behavioral metrics across different contexts. Further, we found repeated results of increasingly uninteruppted playing and notable differences in responses to online posts by Mortimer and posts by participant's human friends.