CAREER:The Uncanny Valley in Socially Appropriate Haptic Interactions

Social touch is a natural mode of communication between humans that can help maintain relationships, communicates emotions, and directly reflects physical and psychological closeness between individuals. The importance of social touch is becoming more evident as the time humans spend communicating through computers in videoconferencing, email, and text messaging increases.

Social distancing guidelines required by the recent pandemic has exacerbated this issue, leading many individuals to suffer the negative effects of a lack of human touch. Without the depth and subtlety of in-person communication, remote communication causes increased feelings of loneliness and social isolation, which can have a significant impact on mental and physical health.

Although prior work has created haptic devices for displaying virtual social touch, limited work has explored the acceptability of these virtual touch sensations or the role they play in virtual social interactions. The hypothesis of this research is that, as in the appearance of robots, there exist haptic sensations that produce a sensation of disgust or revulsion in the user due to a mismatch between the user's expectation (human social touch) and reality (touch from the device), creating a haptic “uncanny valley”.

The goal of this research is to explore and define the uncanny valley for haptic interactions, specifically as it relates to defining appropriate and comfortable virtual social touch.

This project will seek to uncover instances of virtual touch that produce feelings of disgust or revulsion in users due to a mismatch between the user's expectation and reality. Through a series of human subject studies, this work will define the parameters of the haptic uncanny valley for social touch in a set of three scenarios: (1) touch through haptic devices; (2) touch and visual representation with virtual reality; (3) touch and physical embodiment with a humanoid robot.

The project will evaluate actuators, materials, control patterns, visual input, and physical embodiment for their role in the comfort of the user. By determining the existence of and parameters for the uncanny valley for social touch, this project will inform the design of future social touch systems in haptics, robotics, and virtual reality. The outcomes of this research will create design guidelines for haptics, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) designers creating physical social systems, allowing them to avoid designs that lie in the uncanny valley to create interactions that are pleasant, immersive, and socially appropriate.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.