A Picture Might Be Worth a Thousand Words, But It's Not Always Enough to Evaluate Robots

Evaluation of robots commonly occurs using various stimuli, including photos, videos, and live interaction. However, a better understanding of how and why chosen stimuli affect perceptions, and how evaluations using lower fidelity media (e.g. photos) compare to evaluations using higher context stimuli (e.g., videos), is needed. Through a survey of 599 M-Turk participants, we compare robot evaluations based on exposure to three types of media — photos, GIFs, and promotional videos. We analyze nine perception and behavioral intention measures of three home robots with varying levels of anthropomorphism (Olly, Jibo, and Liku): overall liking, liking of appearance, liking of intended use, eeriness, human-likeness, performance expectations, privacy concerns, information seeking intention, and purchase intention. We find that photos consistently differ from ratings of videos for all measures, except for liking of robots’ intended use. Use of GIFs led to measurements in line with videos for seven of the nine measurements, due to the importance of movement in perceptual assessments and character judgments (e.g., friendly, creepy). Except for the most human-like robot, neither photos nor GIFs captured human-likeness to a similar degree as videos, due to the importance of speech in assessments. Though GIFs captured informational and overall privacy concerns well, they did not adequately capture physical privacy concerns.