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About

Elisabeth Ganal is a rising researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI) and game design, whose work focuses on making social robots more accessible, engaging, and socially adept. Her primary research areas include robot integration into virtual environments, storytelling with embodied agents, and the social dynamics of robot interruptions. Ganal’s major contributions include the development of two key Unity-based toolkits: the NarRobot Plugin, which connects the social robot Reeti to the Unity game engine for use as a storyteller or game master, and the Pepper Python Unity Toolkit (PePUT), which enables control of the Pepper robot’s speech, tablet, animation, and navigation functions. These tools have garnered early citations (5 and 4, respectively) and are foundational for bridging game development and HRI. Her 2024 study on politeness in robot interruptions reveals how social norms can mitigate negative perceptions, while her work on emotionally adapted lighting in storytelling with both physical and virtual robots pushes the boundaries of multimodal narrative design. Ganal’s research is notable for its practical, toolkit-oriented approach, empowering developers and researchers to create more natural and immersive human-robot experiences.