Facilitating Unmotivated Tasks Based on Affection for Virtual Pet

In our daily lives, some tasks are burdensome for people and are not willing to do them; however, people often do such tasks for their pets even though they are tired or busy due to affection for the pets. In this paper, we introduce a virtual pet to establish and maintain close relationship with the user to foster a similar feeling with real pets, and a platform for Android OS-based smartphone is developed. Particularly, we show an experiment to investigate the effect of reflective behavior of a virtual pet in increasing affection and accepting requests from the virtual pet, in which activity data collection for supervised-machine learning was chosen as an example of bothersome task. As a result, we confirmed that the reflective behavior significantly contributed to increase affection for the virtual pet, but acceptance rate of a task request did not increased, compared with a non-reflective one.