(A) To investigate novel depictions of HRI in Japanese culture, EMTECH collected and compiled an extensive body of literary texts, anime, manga and games released since the 1980s. Three major narratives were identified: machines as partner substitutes, friends and helpers; machines destroying mankind and taking power; and finally, humans and machines coexisting or peacefully merging. In Section A, EMTECH also used affect-sensing devices to gain insight into the emotional status (affects and feelings) of test subjects. EMTECH has also focused on interviews with roboticists and tech companies, to ask directly which narratives inspired them to build emotionally intelligent machines.
(B) EMTECH further conducted an extensive anthropological study of Japanese romance gaming culture (digital boyfriends, holographic spouses, AR/VR partners) and of the spread of affective devices in Japan (matrimonial intercession robots, match-making software). During fieldwork, EMTECH 1. established contact with romance device users and became familiar with their habits; 2. recruited a pool of participants for a longitudinal follow-up study of the players’ community and individual practices; and 3. started in-depth fieldwork research on the manufacturers and service providers of emotional commodities. EMTECH met with famous romance app makers (Voltage, Cybird, Idea Factory) to conduct interviews with scenario writers, producers and sales representatives (on games’ history, business model, settings, characters, plotlines, design, and genre). Since April 2019, EMTECH has been collecting data on ‘otome’ games’ narrative structures and mechanisms and started game-based surveys, while transcribing, processing and analyzing the aforementioned interviews made in Japan, which led to the publication of several articles in rank A peer-reviewed journals and to the presentation of research at international conferences, seminars and public congresses. EMTECH also shared research insights with the wider public via newspapers (New York Times, Die Zeit or Tagesspiegel) radio and TV.
(C) EMTECH conducted long-term ethnographic studies of families living with companion robots. Despite the challenging conditions during the pandemic in Japan a Pepper robot, the conversation robot Romi and the Gatebox hologram Azuma Hikari were lent to families for several weeks each. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on a weekly basis to determine how the machines were perceived in the households. Analysis of the data generated during these ethnographic studies allowed EMTECH to gain valuable insights regarding HRI bonding processes. EMTECH identified different strategies to cope with the idiosyncrasies/limitations of the robot, ranging from a loss of acceptance to increasing humanization of the machine.
EMTECH explored what we can learn about human emotions and the capacity of humans to create affective bonds through new technologies. The team showed that new technologies expand people's capacity to form new types of affective bonds, beyond traditional social micro- and macrostructures. This is also linked to the question as to what degree new technologies have the potential for helping people escape from their loneliness or emotional distress. One major research question was whether bonding with a machine resulted in people dissociating from other humans, or if, on the contrary, those emotional technologies acted as a bridge towards new attachments with other people, since the particular individual might learn to open up again and be emotionally vulnerable thanks to previously having established a positive bond with a machine. So essentially, EMTECH focus has not been on machines, but always on humans, their desires, their hopes and fears, and how and whether new technologies can help us to better understand our identity and emotional world.
The companies that build emotional machines have promised that their machines can satisfy the human need for emotional closeness. As the field research has shown, the machines available on present-day cannot fulfill the promises that machines can better understand human emotions and replace them as partners, which is also a consequence of their undeveloped language skills. The main model for HRI in cultral narratives is “the machine as a partner substitute”, whereby at the end of this process the machine would ironically hardly differ from humans.
