Section: New Results

Ikio, a sociable kiosk

Participants : Rémi Barraquand [correspondant] , Jiří Pytela, Johan Girod.

In the Personal Assisted Living project we investigate the design of iKio: a sociable kiosk. A simple sketch of the iKio is illustrated in figure 6 . The general idea is to enhance the interaction ability of tablet and smartphone. What motivates the choice of this type of devices is the observation that people have come to treat these gadgets as their own body appendage. As pointed out by the recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center (http://pewinternet.org/ ), people are starting to use their phones and tablets for more sensitive activities that were almost considered taboo in the past, also these devices are becoming substitute for other traditional devices like photo and video cameras.

The design of iKio is therefore influenced by this emerging form of symbiosis and aims to enhance both user-experience and human-technologies interaction. As follow, iKio does not have a fixed body per se, instead it is embodied in a tablet which can be carried along with people in their daily activities but which can also be docked into any mechanical structure that will provide it with enhanced abilities. Using such mechanical structure iKio can express emotion and interact more easily in the physical space of people. The core of iKio is specifically designed to handle and to support ostensive-inferential communication which is characteristic of human communication in contrast with the code model of communication argued to be the main reason of unadapted and autistic interaction between technologies and human. An early prototype of iKio is illustrated in figure 6 . It was constructed using the Bioloid (http://www.robotis.com/xe/bioloid_en ) construction kit.

Figure 6. Preliminary sketch of the iKio together with an early prototype, both the 3d model and its realization using the Bioloid Kit