While technology has made the world "smaller," it has also pulled individuals apart, thanks to mobile phones and other devices that command our attention.

Cornell researchers wanted to see if they could employ technology, in the form of a mirror-equipped robot, to help bring people back together.

Members of the Architectural Robotics Lab, led by Keith Evan Green, professor in both the Department of Human Centered Design (College of Human Ecology) and the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (Cornell Duffield Engineering), built a 4-foot-tall robot - dubbed MirrorBot - with dual mirrors that, when placed in front of a pair of strangers, lets each participant see themself in one mirror and the other person in the other.

In a study involving 16 pairs of participants in a waiting-room setting, MirrorBot spurred conversations, playful exchanges and other interactions between strangers. The findings suggest that robots can act not only as conversational partners, but also as spatial mediators.

"We weren't just trying to trigger conversations, but to support the very first moment of social connection, which is the eye contact," said Serena Guo, M.S. '24, Ph.D. '25, lead author of "Robot-Mediated Mutual Gaze: How a Mobile Robot with Actuated Mirrors Facilitates Encounters between Strangers," which was named best paper in the Design Track category at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, held March 16-19 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Other co-authors were Gilly Leshed, Ph.D. '09, teaching professor in the Department of Information Science, in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science; Guy Hoffman, associate professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MSE), in Cornell Duffield College of Engineering; Jenny Yu '25; Wenqian Niu '25; and MSE master's student Yifei Gao.

"What have the most popular forms of computing done? Mostly pulled people apart, through social media, and contributed to a lot of mental health issues," Green said. "And so we thought, maybe we can use computational things to bring people together."