To be an inanimate object must be, I fancy, a very uninteresting affair. Certainly, being one appears to have a disastrous effect upon the disposition. No one who has had any intercourse with ...

When you think of robotics, you likely think of something rigid, heavy, and built for a specific purpose. New 'Robotic Skins' technology flips that notion on its head, allowing users to animate the ...

Typically, robots are built to perform a single task. To make them more adaptable, researchers from Yale University have developed a kind of “robotic skin” that transforms ordinary objects into ...

People are drawn to social, animate things more than inanimate objects. Previous research has also shown gaze following in humans, a process that has been linked to theory of mind (ToM). In three ...