Living with Robots and intEractive Companions

LIREC

Basis for long term relationships between humans and synthetic companions

LIREC is a collaborative project co-funded by the European Community under the Seventh Framework Programme, Information and Communication Technologies theme.

The challenge
How do we create a new computer technology that will support long term relationships between humans and synthetic companions? To date artificial companions have had limited abilities to support long term, meaningful social interactions with users in real social settings. Whether embodied physically as a robot or as a virtual character on a screen LIREC will develop and test methods that will allow the companion to perceive, remember and react to human users, so enabling a new generation of socially aware applications.

LIREC objectives
LIREC aims to create a new generation of interactive, emotionally intelligent companions that is capable of long-term relationships with humans. LIREC focuses on both virtual companions and physical embodiments such as robots. LIREC will examine how people react to a familiar companion when it swaps from a robot body into a virtual form, for example on a mobile PDA screen.

Homepage: http://www.lirec.eu