Our team, consisting of 13 UXD master's students, participated in an interdisciplinary student project with teams from computer science, AI, and mechanical engineering programs. Our objective was to give emotions to the robot dog, Spike. Therefore we wanted to use a dispay for facial expressions as well as body movement. During the project, we encountered several challenges during development. As a backup, we created a website that displayed emotions per click. While some teams focused on research, user studies, sounds, and backend development, I mainly worked on designing the animations of the facial expressions and subsequent implementation as a web interface. The challenge we faced was finding a suitable solution for getting smooth transitions between emotions. To address this, we designed separate After Effects animations for each transition, which we exported as a Lottie file using Bodymovin. Finally, I inserted the JSON file into the user interface.
