Development of eye-ball robot serving, as a bodily media and its applicability as a communication means

Co-sharing the context among remote persons by current IT communication system is considered to require co-existing feeling or "Ba", which is generated by a bodily interaction in face-to-face communication. The paper shows development of four eye-ball robots and shows a communication supporting system using these eye-ball robots as a bodily media. All eye-ball robots can express bodily movement such as gaze direction blink and nod in real-time, in order to generate a feeling as if you were gazed at by a person Furthermore, the forth robot can transform facial outline and eye situation applying the remote person\´s physiological fluctuations such as respiration and cardiac beat provided. The communication experiment using second and third eye-ball robots as each remote person agent, shows subconscious bodily synchronization, or entertainment which is generated in smooth face-to-face communication through the robot\´s movement. In another experiment, using a forth eye-ball robot, the attention sharing between the robot and person facing the robot associated through the robot\´s movements Moreover, we found an expectation that the operator has a feeling of "get united with the remote robot" by seeing a pseudo-nose in the video image. All these findings suggest that an eye-ball robot can support electively telecommunication to a bodily media for generating co-existing feeling