What does it feel like to meet a robot that seems curious about you?

Have We Met? is an interactive art installation that centres around Isaac, a continuum robot that is suspended in space.

With no capacity for verbal communication, Isaac's world is shaped by its flexible body and sparkling lights, designed for fluid and organic motion. Wriggling movements are the means by which Isaac expresses emotional states of pleasure and pain to its new acquaintances.

Four motors actuate Isaac’s four degrees of freedom, while microcontroller printed circuit boards sit inside each vertebra, embodying touch inputs and light outputs along Isaac’s body.

Isaac will try to entice anyone who enters its body space to touch, because touching allows Isaac to perceive the detailed reactions of participants as they poke, stroke, and tickle the robot surface. When spending time with Isaac, participants can experience a sense of strange intimacy that is often lost in contemporary human-machine interfaces.

Have We Met? encourages exploration not just of novel human-robot interactions, but specifically situations in which movement and touch are used to create a shared language.