Cybernetic Android Avatar "Yui": System Integration, Field Deployment, and Evaluation
Remote communication technologies have become widely used; however, supporting a sense of shared physical space and conveying rich non-verbal cues remain challenging in many social interaction scenarios. This study presents "Yui," a full-body cybernetic android avatar designed to integrate operator-side immersive teleoperation with interlocutor-side human-like social signaling. Yui combines a 55-degrees of freedom full-body mechanism with a previously developed android head, facial expression and gaze control, upper-body and arm motion, hand actuation, and a mobile platform. It can be operated through either the immersive mode using a head mounted display-based interface or desktop mode using a webcam-based interface. We evaluated the system through three real-world deployments: a long-term public exhibition at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Kansai, Japan; a remote educational exchange between elementary school students; and a public interaction study with general participants. During the Expo deployment, two units accumulated approximately 1131 h of operation, demonstrating both operational feasibility and maintenance challenges. In the public study, both operators and interlocutors reported positive impressions of co-presence and willingness to use the system. Interlocutors also rated the avatar positively in terms of human likeness and the transmission of emotions and intentions. The results indicate usability for general operators while suggesting room for improvement in precise controllability. These findings provide field-derived evidence and design implications for socially deployable full-body android avatars.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Public Evaluation on Potential Social Impacts of Fully Autonomous Cybernetic Avatars for Physical Support in Daily-Life Environments: Large-Scale Demonstration and Survey at Avatar Land
Cybernetic avatars (CAs) are key components of an avatar-symbiotic society, enabling individuals to overcome physical limitations through virtual agents and robotic assistants. While semi-autonomous CAs intermittently re…
Homo Cyberneticus: The Era of Human-AI Integration
This article is submitted and accepted as ACM UIST 2019 Visions. UIST Visions is a venue for forward thinking ideas to inspire the community. The goal is not to report research but to project and propose new research dir…
Procams-Based Cybernetics
Procams-based cybernetics is a unique, emerging research field, which aims at enhancing and supporting our activities by naturally connecting human and computers/machines as a cooperative integrated system via projector-…
Definition of Cybernetical Neuroscience
A new scientific field is introduced and discussed, named cybernetical neuroscience, which studies mathematical models adopted in computational neuroscience by methods of cybernetics -- the science of control and communi…
Investigating AI's Challenges in Reasoning and Explanation from a Historical Perspective
This paper provides an overview of the intricate relationship between social dynamics, technological advancements, and pioneering figures in the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. It explores the impact o…