You can make a piece of cardboard feel like it's making eye contact with you just by hollowing out the eyes.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
Perception Is All You Need: A Neuroscience Framework for Low Cost Sensorless Gaze in HRI
arXiv · 2604.09829
The Takeaway
Humans have a 'convexity prior,' meaning our brains instinctively assume faces are outward-curving even when they are actually concave. This neurological exploit allows a cheap, sensorless robot to appear to be watching you from any angle in the room.
From the abstract
Gaze-following in child-robot interaction improves attention, recall, and learning, but requires expensive platforms (\$30,000+), sensors, algorithms, and raises privacy concerns. We propose a framework that avoids sensors and computation entirely, instead relying on the human visual system's assumption of convexity to produce perceptual gaze-following between a robot and its viewer. Specifically, we motivate sub-dollar cardboard robot design that directly implements the brain's own gaze computa