The android FACE was the main “actress” of a very special video, released by 20th Century Fox on August 25th. The video was recorded in the lab of the Research Center “E. Piaggio” of the University of Pisa for the “Morgan” movie, which will open in theather next Friday, September the 2nd.
The robot FACE was casted to produce a reaction video, a special content where people emotional reactions to movie’s trailers are captured and mounted in a clip. Reaction videos are becoming very popular and on YouTube it is possible to find reaction videos with more than 14 millions of visualization. For this Reason, Fox decided to produce for the Morgan promotion a “Robot Reaction” video where the trailer watchers are social robots with emotional capabilities instead of people.
“FACE has a very complex facial architecture” - said Daniele Mazzei, one of the FACE’s fathers - “consisting of 32 motors placed between the skull and the skin that in a way similar to the human facial anatomy, thus allowing the actuation of very complex micro facial movements and the reproduction of a wide amount of complex facial expressions.” The humanoid robot FACE watched the Morgan trailer and reacted to it performing facial expressions aligned with the emotional and empathic content perceived from the video.
FACE, acronym of Facial Automation for Conveying Emotions, is an android built by a team of the researcher Center “E. Piaggio”, of the university of Pisa, headed by Prof. Danilo De Rossi. The robot is a social android able to empathically interact with people through a non-verbal communication. By using a set of sensors integrated in its head FACE drives its gaze toward human interlocutors analysing their facial expressions and gestures, and inferring their emotional states. On the basis of the inferred emotional state of its interlocutors FACE establish a non-verbal communication with them by using facial expressions and gestures. FACE is nowadays used as tool for the design and study of Artificial Intelligence models and for the study of the social and affective interaction between humans and robots.
The FACE cognitive system reproduces facial expressions starting from the seven basic emotional states: Hanger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness and Surprise. Thanks to its stereotypical and simplified facial expressivity, the FACE emotional states are simpler to be recognized and interpreted than human emotions. For this reason FACE has been demonstrated to be usable also for driving interaction with people having deficit in understanding human emotions like subjects with Autism.
LINK TO THE REACTION VIDEO
http://fox.co/RobotsReact
http://fox.co/RobotsReactInterview
