The Wizard-of-Oz approach

The current state of non-human agents, such as robots, is that many are unable to do all the things that a researcher wants them to do in a study. One way to deal with this is the Wizard-of-Oz approach. This means that the researcher is controlling the non-human agent in an unseen way, while it appears to be autonomous from the participants’ point of view. The research project Interactions with Artificial Humans uses a Wizard-of-Oz approach in some of the studies. The idea is that this allows researchers to explore – already now – certain characteristics of non-human agents rather than waiting for them to acquire these characteristics. The Wizard-of-Oz approach, then, can be seen as an attempt to explore the future before it has happened.