Study finds anime and animal faces appeal in tests on a social robot

Through an augmented-reality headset, 24 volunteers watched faces and heard voices appear on Qoobo, a soft, cushion-like social robot with a swinging tail. The University of Glasgow team found that animal-like and anime-style faces were the most appealing combinations in its tests.

The researchers, Shaun Macdonald and Josh Yip, built five virtual face styles: animal-like, robot-like, emoji-style, anime-inspired and a design made only of eyes. They paired them with cat noises, human-like vocal sounds, electronic noises, music and “animalese,” the unintelligible sounds used by characters in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. Augmented reality made it possible to test these designs quickly on the body of the same physical robot.

Animal-like faces worked well with Qoobo’s animal-like body. Anime-style faces ranked just as highly, offering more expressive possibilities than a real pet while still feeling like a pet-like creature. Faces consistently outperformed sounds when volunteers judged emotional communication and connection. Human sounds were easier to interpret emotionally, but animal sounds were liked more; “animalese” also ranked highly despite being unintelligible.

The result was less tidy than a simple readability test. Volunteers said understanding the robot’s emotion mattered, yet readability had little influence on which designs they preferred. Pet owners also reacted differently: they were more likely to treat animal-like prototypes as real pets and robot-like faces as machines. The researchers say there is no single face or voice with universal appeal.

So what changes in practice? The work suggests that designers could use augmented reality to let owners try or customize new faces, voices and functions on existing social robots, potentially extending their useful life. That remains a design possibility, not a deployed feature: the evidence comes from a small volunteer experiment, and the paper was due to be presented at MobileHCI 2026 in Swansea, Wales.