Plant-shaped robot object as an awareness driven display device of daily life information

This paper proposes a plant-shaped robot object as an awareness driven display device of human daily life information. While a conventional monitor display (operation driven display) device transmits information to a person when it is operated intentionally (actively) by the person, the awareness driven display device transmits the information to the person when the device is made aware by chance (passively) by the person with a change of its appearance. The constructed display device is designed taking account of a houseplant. It consists of 12 leaf modules and a flower module. It displays the information by means of leaf poses and extent of flower opening. The leaves can also sense a touch action. A display experiment was conducted to evaluate the device. The activity of a remote target person is calculated from actual sensed daily life data and displayed to the subject person. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the display system. It reveals that a larger change of pose and flower opening evokes more effective awareness of the activity of the person. This display device in the future will be able to be utilized as a communication tool to generate a virtual feeling of cohabitation even though the remote target person lives apart from the subject person.