Appearance and Physical Presence of Anthropomorphic Media in Parallel with Non-face-to-face Communication Analyses of Non-verbal and Underconscious Expressions Tomoko Yonezawa 1 Noriko Suzuki 2 Kenji Mase 3 Kiyoshi Kogure 4 1 Kansai University 2 Doshisha University 3 Nagoya University 4 Kanazawa Institute of Technology Abstract: Puppets could become a new tool for expressive communication, in parallel with tra- ditional communication channels in human-human interaction. This research aimed to verify the effectiveness of appearance and embodied presence of anthropomorphic media. In this paper, we focused on a usage of the anthropomorphic medium and the user’s conscious or under-conscious behaviors in parallel to non-face-to-face conversation. We conducted a non-face-to-face conversa- tional experiment by adopting a stuffed-toy robot, which allowed expression via motion and vocal cues. The bare-robot condition was prepared to compare the appearace, and the monitor which showed the stuffed-toy was adopted to compare the embodied presence. The analyses of the results showed that the appearance affects on the unconscious behaviors of the user and that the embod- ied presence affects on the conversational utterances. We conclude the physical embodied presence and appearance of the stuffed-toy robot play an important role in non-verbal communication in non-face-to-face conversation with the robot system. 1 Introduction Recent media for synchronous communication have been developed various types of expressions even in the case of non-face-to-face communication. One of the most richest human-human communications is a face-to-face interaction in a real space. We undercon- sciously or consciously use various expressions to tell contents of the communication in detail. On the otherhand, many researches have tried to enrich our communication by new methods for shar- ing information parallel to on-line communications. There have been a research of communication sharing a real virtual space [1]. The usage of avatars instead of the users is also discussed for enriched nonverbal communication in virtual space [2]. These are new methods for virtual communication and tele-presence depending on the emersive feelings of individuals. The modalities of the communication channels are expected to help the virtual communication. Focusing on the nonverbal and multimodal chan- nels that helps verbal communication, we have pro- posed an expressive method using a musical puppet system [3, 4] as a new channel in parallel with a con- ventional face-to-face communication. When we ob- served the communications between the holder of the system (player) and the participants who do not have the system (listener), the balance of the communica- tion irregularly varied by the expression of the puppet system. In order to estimate the factors for this irregu- lar change, we suppose that the characteristics of the anthropomorphic media consist of a) embodied pres- ence and b) appearance. Presence of the anthropo- morphic media may cause the contribute the reality of anthropomorphism. Appearance with a face, body, or some other bodily parts like a human has an abil- ity to make people to treat the presence as though the media were living matters. In this research, we focus on a non-face-to-face communication using anthropo- morphic media. IP RobotPhone [5] is a tele-communication medium for gestural expressions of a stuffed-toy robot. This system was designed as communication assistance par- allel to conventional speech communication in IP phone. Here, we aim to clarify the effects of both factors, pres- ence and appearance, of anthropomorphic media in human-human non-face-to-face communications using an anthropomorphic device. This paper introduces our experiment of the difference effects of a) the ap- pearace and b) the embodied presence of anthropo- morphic media in parallel to non-face-to-face commu- nication with the other person. Based on the compar- isons using the analyses of both subjective evaluations and behavioral observations, we discuss the different types of the effect on the user’s expression. 2 Related Research There have been many researches on social robots in these two decades. Robovie system [6] was designed to research social reactions of the humanoid robot. Several pet robots [7, etc.] were developed for com-