The CuddleBits are handheld furry robots that express emotions through breathing movements. We wanted to make a lot of different sizes and shapes, so I created two design systems that could be easily modified (full instructions here).
They were cheap, simple tools to study emotional touch.
We wrapped them in our fabric touch sensor and placed them in many different emotional situtations. We asked people to tell them emotional stories (like a talk therapy session). We asked voice actors to puppet them.
The project started off as a way to build small, cheaper versions of the Haptic Creature and CuddleBot. It was a design challenge: I was asked to make a pocket-sized version that used only one motor and still expressed a wide range of emotion. I went through an extensive low fidelity prototyping process, starting with cardboard, mechano, and duotang binders.
Related academic publications
> L. Cang, P. Bucci, and K. E. MacLean, “Cuddlebits: Friendly, low-cost furballs that respond to touch,” in Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ACM, 2015, pp. 365–366.
> P. Bucci, L. Cang, M. Chun, D. Marino, O. Schneider, H. Seifi, and K. MacLean, “Cuddlebits: An iterative prototyping platform for complex haptic display,” Eurohaptics Demo Session, 2016.
> P. Bucci, X. L. Cang, A. Valair, D. Marino, L. Tseng, M. Jung, J. Rantala, O. S. Schneider, and K. E. MacLean, “Sketching cuddlebits: Coupled prototyping of body and behaviour for an affective robot pet,” in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2017, pp. 3681–3692.
> D. Marino, P. Bucci, O. S. Schneider, and K. E. MacLean, “Voodle: Vocal doodling to sketch affective robot motion,” in Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, ACM, 2017, pp. 753–765.
> P. Bucci, “Building believable robots: An exploration of how to make simple robots look, move, and feel right,” Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2017.
> P. Bucci, L. Zhang, X. L. Cang, and K. E. MacLean, “Is it happy? behavioural and narrative frame complexity impact perceptions of a simple furry robot’s emotions,” in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, pp. 1–11.
> L. H. Zhang, P. Bucci, X. L. Cang, and K. MacLean, “Infusing cuddlebits with emo- tion: Build your own and tell us about it,” in Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, pp. 1–4.