Suspension of disbelief in social robotics

This paper discusses people´s willingness to suspend their beliefs of what is living in physical social robotics. Our attention focuses on users´ perception of the machines they interact with, in particular how much fiction can persist in human-robot interaction. We expand on this concept of suspension of disbelief (SoD) in order to understand the role and nature of user engagement in robotics and to discuss a balance between fantasy and realism, between user expectation and the design challenges faced by robotics.