Disney has made a life-like robot that stares into your soul

In a paper titled ‘Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze’ the company describes the development of a system for lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions using a humanoid Audio-Animatronics bust.

Disney's humanoid robot (Disney)

Humanoid robots are slowly becoming more human than ever. Now, Disney has shared a research that details how it plans on making humanoid robots a tad bit more human, at least as far as eye movements and head movements are concerned.

Gizmodo reports that Disney's team is trying to fix the dead-eye stare of humanoid robots. Gizmodo reports that a research team at Disney is trying to make head movements and eye movements subtle, this would make the lifeless robot lacking skin a bit more humane.

In a paper titled ‘Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze' the company describes the development of a system for lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions using a humanoid Audio-Animatronics bust. Disney says that the research paper not only to improve the eye movements from a technological standpoint but also through the lens of character animation “to create an interaction which demonstrates the illusion of life”.

“A complete system is described that perceives persons in the environment, identifies persons-of-interest based on salient actions, selects an appropriate gaze behavior, and executes high fidelity motions to respond to the stimuli. We use mechanisms that mimic motor and attention behaviors analogous to those observed in biological systems including attention habituation, saccades, and differences in motion bandwidth for actuators,” Disney wrote in a research paper.

The research also allows ‘layering of simple motor movements to create increasingly complex behaviors which are able to interactively and realistically react to salient stimuli in the environment through subsuming lower levels of behavior.' Result? Result of this system is an interactive human-robot experience capable of human-like gaze behaviors.