MirrorBot
Eye contact, even momentarily between strangers, plays a pivotal role in fostering human connection, promoting happiness, and enhancing belonging. Yet, the physical rigidity of public spaces, such as airport terminals, often limits opportunities for meaningful interactions between strangers who often remain absorbed in their personal activities. This paper introduces Mirrorbot, a robotic mirror system that transforms static environments into dynamic, socio-spatial interfaces. Through autonomous navigation and adaptive mirror control, Mirrorbot facilitates serendipitous, non-verbal interactions by dynamically transitioning reflections from self-focused to mutual recognition, sparking eye contact, shared awareness, and playful engagement. By integrating mirrors—a familiar and accessible architectural element—Mirrorbot disrupts conventional isolation in public spaces, enabling embodied, accessible interactions that go beyond screen-based solutions. This work demonstrates the potential of interactive mirrors to enrich public spaces, fostering spontaneous connections in shared environments.
Publications (Ongoing):
Serena Ge Guo, Jenny Yu, Wenqian Niu, Yifei Gao, Guy Hoffman, Gilly Leshed, and Keith Evan Green. Robot-Mediated Mutual Gaze: How a Mobile Robot with Actuated Mirrors Facilitates Encounters Between Strangers. In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, (HRI ’26)
🏆Best Design Paper (top 1% of submissions)
Serena Ge Guo, Qi Yang, Jenny Yu, Wenqian Niu, Yunting Yan, Gilly Leshed, Guy Hoffman, and Keith Evan Green. “When We're Looking at the Robot, We See Each Other”: A Comparison of Robotic, Mirror-Based, and Hybrid Interventions for Stranger Interaction. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)
Ge (Serena) Guo, Qi Yang, Yunting Yan, Xiaoman Yang, Guy Hoffman, Gilly Leshed, and Keith Evan Green. 2025. MirrorBot: Exploring Socio-Spatial Interactions that Foster Serendipitous Human Connections Through Robotic Mirrors. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages.