Pervasive Pleo: Long-term Attachment with Artificial Pets Joana Dimas, Iolanda Leite, André Pereira, Pedro Cuba, Rui Prada, Ana Paiva INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico Av. Prof. Cavaco Silva, Taguspark 2744‐016, Porto Salvo, Portugal {joana.silva,iolanda.leite,andre.pereira,pedro.cuba,rui.prada,ana.paiva}@gaips.inesc-id.pt ABSTRACT Playing with artificial pets is becoming a very popular activity. Artificial pets are present in a variety of forms and interaction styles, from online websites to video game consoles and, more recently, as social robots. However, some of these artificial creatures, in particular robotic pets, are not capable of engaging users for extended periods of time. Issues such as lack of perception capabilities or battery life sometimes break the playful experiences. To increase the attachment between artificial pets and their owners, and create more enjoyable experiences, we propose to extend the identity of a Pleo robot by creating a virtual representation of the robot in a mobile device. The user needs to take care of Pleo, and is able to do so by interacting either with the robot or with the mobile device. In this paper, we describe the work in progress of this system and discuss some future work directions. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – interaction styles. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Interaction styles, artificial pets, handheld devices, attachment. 1. INTRODUCTION Animals have been a source of companionship and entertainment to humans for many generations. Taking inspiration from human interaction with real pets, researchers and companies have been developing autonomous creatures with the purpose of entertaining and eliciting attachment from the user, commonly designated as artificial pets [1]. Some of the most successful examples are Tamagotchi, Nintendogs, Eyepet and online websites such as Neopets. At the same time, the decreasing costs in electronics in the recent years enabled the appearance of commercial robotic artefacts for entertainment purposes, such as Furby, Sony’s AIBO or Nabaztag. In the HRI field, researchers are focusing on how to make such robots more fun to interact [2], while others evaluate if robots can have therapeutic effect on elderly people [3] or autistic children [4]. One of the most popular animal-like robotic toys that recently entered the consumer market is Pleo, a robotic baby dinosaur designed to act like a real animal. Pleo is capable of conveying emotions, evolving over time and perceiving the environment through a set of touch sensors, IR-sensors for distance detection, a low resolution camera and two microphones. An analysis of blogs and web forums about Pleo [5] revealed that the majority of the blogs only contained a few posts concerning the initial stage of interaction, and after that people stop writing about the robot. Another user reported that after owning Pleo for five weeks, she only turns it on to show it to other people. This may happen because the perception and interaction capabilities of these robots are still limited, but there are also other relevant issues that might disrupt the interaction cycle. For example, Pleo’s battery lasts for about one hour, and needs to charge during four hours. Although the potential of Pleo and other pet-like robots seems promising due to the physicality of the interaction, most of these robots are not capable of engaging users for extended periods of time, especially when compared to the enormous success of virtual pets in video game consoles or online. What if users could always have the possibility of playing with his/her Pleo even when the battery is charging? What if they could carry it everywhere? Will the interaction become more enjoyable? Will users become more attached to it? To address these questions, we took inspiration from pervasive gaming technology [6], where gaming experiences benefit from a mixture of real and virtual game elements. We are extending the “identity” of a Pleo robot by creating a virtual representation of it in a mobile device. Users will then be able to interact with Pleo either in the mobile device or by directly interacting with the robot. The mobile device attempts to overcome some of the limitations of the robot, such as battery lifetime and the lack of communication, which makes it difficult for users to interpret the robot’s internal state. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we provide a brief overview on artificial pets. After that, we describe in more detail the interaction scenario that we are developing, with special emphasis on the mobile version. Finally, we draw some conclusions and future work. 2. RELATED WORK In this section, we introduce some of the most successful commercial artificial pets and toys. When presenting the systems, we will focus on the interaction modalities between users and the artificial pets. After the release of Tamagotchi in 1997, artificial pets have grown significantly in both toy and gaming industries. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). MobileHCI 2010 September 7-10, 2010, Lisboa, Portugal. ACM 978-1-60558-835-3/10/09.