The issue of believability is core to android science, the challenge of creating a robot that can pass as a near human. While researchers are making great strides in improving the quality of androids and their likeness to people, it is simultaneously important to develop theoretical foundations behind believability, and experimental methods for exploring believability. In this paper, we explore a visual processing approach to investigating the believability of android faces, and present results from a study comparing current-generation android faces to humans’ faces. We show how android faces are still not quite as believable as humans, and provide some mechanisms that may be used to investigate and compare believability in future projects.
