This charming Japanese robot acts as a gaming companion, taking over another controller and playing against you while chatting about what's happening on the screen. It was originally designed to eliminate players' loneliness and allow more and more isolated players to learn to socialize.
The nameless robot was designed by researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology to make gaming more fun, social and less lonely. In Japan, the inverted population pyramid and chaotic work attitudes are not conducive to people's social life.
Based on the theory that video games are more fun when played with friends, the team built a robot to play alongside you, compete with you, and adjust its performance to keep the challenge level within a fun range. The researchers also equipped it with an AI language model similar to GPT, so that it can talk some appropriate trash, give you some encouragement, groan and complain when you beat it to increase your satisfaction, or simply chat with you about the game you're playing.
"The lack of dialogue in daily life has become a problem in recent years," reads a research paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. "As a solution to this problem, conversational robots [have] attracted attention as a substitute for humans and as a means of encouraging everyday speech."
The bot sat on a couch with 30 testers, playing the same game with and without the bot. They were then asked about their experience, and most found it more fun with the robot than without it. Researchers told TechXplore they are looking at how to develop the idea from a 15-minute experience into a game that can be played with people for years and can be tailored for different groups of people, such as older players or those with autism.
In 2023, we see in-game NPCs becoming fully fledged conversation partners, but this is different; AI can stay outside of the game, joining in and reacting to actions or storylines, encouraging you to be more social.
In fact, if the idea is good, it doesn't need to be an external robot. There’s no reason why you can’t have an AI companion built into your console’s operating system, ready to chat with you in a single-player experience, assist in a co-op multiplayer game, or go head-to-head with you in a competitive multiplayer game. The malleable personality of language models allows most people to design the gaming partners they want.
Sure, it's a bit of an indictment of our postmodern society, but AI companionship is definitely going to be a reality. If it's going to sleep in the bedroom with us, we might as well let it sleep on the couch.