Sociable Dining Table: Towards "KonKon" interface based on a mutual adaptation method

Abstract

As we know dining table is a central hub in home environment to share information, activities, and decision making with family members and visitors. Since, it's important to control the environment of dining table based on member's preferences and intentions to a create fascinate surrounding. As a next-generation dining table, we are investigating a "Sociable Dining Table " with "KonKon" interface (knock sound) for interacting between user and sociable creatures (pot and dish). We have focus on knock sound "KonKon" as minimal cues for proto-communication to establish mutual adaption between creatures and user. In this paper, we discuss the concept and system configuration for the Sociable Dining Table, and Actor-Critic architecture based mutual adaptation. In the experiment, we evaluate the performance of sociable creatures with an Actor-Critic adaptation model while user interacting with the Sociable Dining Table.