Researchers at Cornell University are using technology in the form of mirrored robots to bring people together.
Members of the Architectural Robotics Institute, led by Keith Evan Green, have created a four-foot-tall robot called Mirrorbot. Mirrorbot is equipped with two mirrors that, when placed in front of a pair of strangers, allows each participant to see themselves in one mirror and the other person in the other mirror.
In a study with participants in a waiting room environment, Mirrorbot facilitated conversations, playful exchanges, and other interactions between strangers. The findings suggest that robots can function not only as conversation partners but also as spatial mediators.
We aimed not just to spark conversation, but to support the first moment of social connection: eye contact. ”
Serena Guo, first author of the paper
“What has the most popular form of computing done? It’s driven people apart, primarily through social media, and it’s caused a lot of mental health issues,” Green said. “So we thought maybe we could use computation to bring people together.”
“I was interested in our everyday environments, everyday moments between strangers, where people are physically close but socially separated,” Guo said. “We’ve seen many situations where everyone is on their phones in waiting rooms, public parks, and other shared environments. People may be physically together, but socially distant.”
For the experiment, Guo and his team recruited 32 people between the ages of 18 and 50 and told them they were participating in an experiment involving a short-term memory task (they were later told the nature of the experiment). The pair were ushered into a waiting room, where three chairs were lined up along one wall of the approximately 12-by-12-foot space.
After a while, a mirrorbot appeared from behind the screen, and Mr. Guo remotely controlled the robot’s movements, allowing each participant to choose from pre-programmed mirror positions until they could see both their own and the other’s reflection.
Deliberately small and covered in soft material to be non-threatening, the Mirrorbot elicited a variety of behaviors, with 12 of the 16 groups reporting that their first meaningful contact with their partner was through a mirror rather than face-to-face. Some pairs tried to mutually understand the robot’s meaning, some were obsessed with it, and some used mirrors as a means of discreetly gauging the other’s receptivity.
For a related paper, Guo said she and her collaborators tested other devices – a robot without a mirror, a wall-mounted mirror, or no device at all – to see how interpersonal relationships develop. For larger participants (40 pairs of individuals), we found MirrorBot to be most effective as it encouraged eye contact.
They also thought that some object might act as an icebreaker.
“Unusual or novel objects can encourage people to have a conversation. However, people often end up talking about the object itself rather than being interested in each other. We feel that Mirrorbot is different because the focus is on another human, not the robot,” Guo said.
Green, Guo, and the team will present a related paper at the Computing Machinery Institute Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.
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Reference magazines:
Guo, Singapore; others. (2026). Robot-mediated mutual gaze: How a mobile robot with an actuated mirror facilitates encounters between strangers. Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. DOI: 10.1145/3757279.3785647. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3757279.3785647
