One of the goals of Bowtie beyond transforming HERB itself into an actor is to completely transform the acting stage and find new angles from this kind of performances. When something like a robot takes the role of the main actor, several things start changing. One of the most relevant changes is the way other actor interact with this new playful object. Also the way the director guides the performance change completely. He or she must address different problems on how the attention is being allocated and how the flow of the performance is going. Here is a diagram showing the normal process with human actors:
As we can see. The process seems very natural. There is direct feebdack and communication between the actors and the director. Of course a bad actor or a bad director can be detrimental for the correct flow of the performance. But even is the most extreme cases the verbal communication and verbal cues generate a good framework for the development of the performance. In contrast here is the digram showing how the process work with a robot and the setup we are trying to build:
Adding something as complex as a robot to an acting performance would be always a big challenge to solve. However, Bowtie is desgining a flexible interface as wells as several dynamic animations that can make the communication process between the actors, the director and the robot operator, much better. The ultimate goal of Bowtie is to contribute material that can be used in future research process to develop better human-robot interactions.