To act or react, which is more crucial? Usually this question intends to elevate all our actions to the levels of conscious and awareness and missing the point that even in our aware actions we are still reacting to something prior to the action itself. Meaning that both acting and reacting are two inseparable concepts that co-exist in the same situation. As a result, the wheel of acting and reacting is eternally in motion leading to progress and evolvement in life. Therefore, acting and reacting in practice play a role in research studies. We will discuss theatre acting and audience reacting to it in a novel method that involves robots on stage within the context of HRI experiments.

Within our research in the dynamics of living with robots and interactive companions, it is essential to consider actions of robots and reactions of humans for the near future scenarios. Testing similar scenarios during the present could approximate and anticipate the future. In LIREC and within the various studies conducted, a relevant study of sharing living spaces with robots in a home and social places was performed to investigate how this will affect social spaces relationships and proxmics with humans in order to shape how the interaction will have to be. For this reason the experiment has to involve working with medium or large human-scaled mobile robots in rather big spaces with considerable resources of hardware and human researchers and experimenters [1,2,3,4].

If we take the Wizard of OZ method for example, it involves specific settings that are not always easy to have with many particular limitations related to the number of participants on the one hand, and to the number of the experimenters running and administrating the robot on the other hand. It is essential however to have valid and reliable results in these kind of experiments. Thus a sufficient number of experiments have to be run with rather big number of participants. Due to the restrictions and unaffordable resources to run such studies that would last for long periods of time; other methods of experimentation has to be used.