Mixing robotic realities

This paper contests that Mixed Reality (MR) offers a potential solution in achieving transferability between Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Virtual characters (possibly of a robotic genre) can offer highly expressive interfaces that are as convincing as a human, are comparably cheap and can be easily adapted and personalized. We introduce the notion of a mixed reality agent, i.e. an agent consisting of a physical robotic body and a virtual avatar displayed upon it. We realized an augmented reality interface with a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) in order to interact with such systems and conducted a pilot study to demonstrate the usefulness of mixed reality agents in human-robot collaborative tasks.