IDC 2009 – Demos
3-5 June, 2009 – Como, Italy
Petimo: Safe Social Networking Robot for Children Adrian David Cheok
Owen Noel Newton Fernando
Charith Lasantha Fernando
National University of Singapore and Keio Media Design, Keio University, Japan Tel +65-81181044
Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore Tel +65-81072194
Keio Media Design, Keio University, Japan Tel +81-090-6478-4490
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
cyber world is also growing. However, cyberspace is increasingly becoming an unsafe and more victimized environment, especially for children [1]. This results in conflicting messages between parent and child, social isolation, cyber connectivity with unknown people with unverified identities. Psychologists have theorized about the meaning of online relationships during adolescence and warned about the dangers of sexually exploitative online relationships [2].
ABSTRACT As social networking widely spreads among the community, especially among the younger generation, the negative influence created on children has become a serious social concern. “Petimo” is an interactive robotic toy designed to protect children from potential risks in social networks and the virtual world and it helps them to make a safely connected social networking environment. It adds a new physical dimension to social computing through enabling a second authentication mode, providing extra safety in making friends by physically touching each others robot. Petimo can be connected to any social network and it provides safety and security for children. As a proof of concept, we have developed a 3D virtual world, “Petimo-World” which demonstrates all of the realizable basic features with traditional online social networks. Petimo-World stands out from all other virtual worlds with its interesting and sophisticated interactions such as the visualization of a friends’ relationships through spatial distribution in the 3D space to clearly understand the closeness of the friendship, personalized avatars and sending of special gifts/emoticons.
The motivation behind this research is to provide a safe path for children to make friends in online social networks. As shown in Figure 1 “Petimo” is carefully designed to protect children against potential risks in the virtual world and help them to make a network of friends not only in the real world, but also in the virtual worlds. The name is coined with “Petit,” meaning small or little in French and “tomo,” meaning friend in Japanese, which resembles a small friend. Its most impressive and compelling feature adds a new physical dimension to social networking through physical touching of the robots to authenticate new friend adding through a centralized database. This physical touch requirement helps prevent malevolent adult strangers being added as friends and allows children to fully exploit the new digital social world. In addition, with this system, children experience enhanced relationships with their friends through interactions in both real and virtual worlds by sending gifts and emoticons mediated by their robots with tactile, visual, and audible stimuli.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces Evaluation/methodology, Graphical user interfaces (GUI), Interaction styles.
General Terms design, experimentation, security, human factors.
Keywords social networking, robotics, ubiquitous computing, digital neighborhoods.
Figure 1. Petimo outer view and menu navigation.
1. INTRODUCTION
We have developed a 3D virtual world with social networking capabilities, called “Petimo-World,” which is designed based on Japanese popular “Kawaii” (cute) culture, as shown in Figure 2.
Social networks are becoming the latest trend in online communication. It helps people to make new friends while keeping old friends in close contact. With the exponential expansion of digital media, the attraction of teenagers and younger children to social networks and other activities in the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
Figure 2. Petimo-World.
IDC 2009, June 3–5, 2009, Como, Italy Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-395-2/09/06… $5.00. 274
IDC 2009 – Demos
3-5 June, 2009 – Como, Italy
The user input sensing includes a smooth scrolling enabled capacitive touch sensing pad primarily for child-friendly menu navigation. Pressure activated squeeze areas of the robot surface facilitates exchange of special gifts and emoticons online. User can experience a multimodal engagement visually via a miniature OLED graphics display, audibly by an embedded sound module for producing cute sounds and through haptics using vibrotactile effect generators.
According to the concept of social network security, the cute virtual characters in Petimo-World are linked to the physical robotic toys, resembling virtual characters interacting with each other accordingly while children are playing with their friends through “Petimo” physically. Additionally, the Petimo-World provides the capability for parents to supervise their children’s online behaviors in a friendly way through its parental authentication module which enhances not only children’s online security but also the relationship between children and parents. For instance, all tentative friend additions are queued in the parental authentication module. A notification to the parent is sent informing about the awaiting friend requests. This feature aims to provide parents the missing moral link with their children in the virtual world.
Real world interactions can occur physically between many Petimos. The data transferring between many Petimo devices will create a large amount of data to be sent to Petimo-World server at a given time. To avoid possible data collision, a proper hand shaking protocol is implemented. All interactions between Petimos will be updated instantly on the Petimo-World if the Petimo is online. Otherwise, all events are stored in the device and is synchronized with the Petimo-World once connected. These interactions are then reflected in the Petimo-World.
The arrangement of friends in the 3D orbit based on their friendship is a novel representation of a friend list in social networks. This arrangement is called “spherical orbits” because the friends are grouped according to their friendship strength with the owner of the orbit, and distributed in different spherical regions having the user character centered. This way the user can interact with the closest friends quite easily while she can visit distant friends by traversing different orbits.
3. CONCLUSION Petimo is a revolutionary, interactive, and friendly soft robotic device, extending its capabilities to change social networks fundamentally. It provides a novel approach for children to make friends easily in a more protected and safe social networking environment. Petimo together with Petimo-World, encourages the development and use of real social networks through interactions whereas they interact by squeezing, touching, sending gifts/emoticons to their friends, family, and parents. This will dramatically change the younger generation’s tendency of being disconnected from family and loved ones by bridging the gaps of existing social network security issues and giving a helping hand to support the child’s safe path toward a secured and personally enriching social networking experience.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION Petimo is a small RISC micro controller based robot that includes a close proximity contact-less friend identification exchange function using close proximity radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. As shown in Figure 3 Children can add friends by activating the “Add Friend” option in the Petimo menu and physically touching their friends Petimo. This internally results in exchanging of unique 64-bit identification keys between two Petimos and sending this event to the online user verification system for authentication, after which the relationship is created.
4. ADDITIONAL AUTHORS Kening Zhu, Nimesha Ranasinghe, Michelle Narangoda, Isuru Sawubhagya Godage, Roshan Lalintha Peiris, James Keng Soon Teh, Chamari Priyange Edirisinghe, Kasun Karunanayaka, Timothy Merritt, Dilrukshi Abeyrathne, Junsong Hou, and WeiWang Thang are from Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore. Yukihiro Morisawa, Miyuru Dayarathna, Anusha Indrajith Withana, Nancy Lan-Lan Ma, and Makoto Danjo are from Keio Media Design, Keio University, Japan.
5. REFERENCES [1] Cho, C.-H. and Cheon, H. J. Children’s exposure to negative internet content: Effects of family context. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 49(4):488–509, 2005. [2] Wolak, J. Escaping or connecting? Characteristics of youth who form close online relationships. Journal of Adolescence, 26(1):105–119, February 2003.
Figure 3. Contact less friends adding feature.
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