**2. Evaluation and Initial User Trials**

In this section, we report three small-scale user trials in which participants were asked to perform simple tasks using the animate objects. The aim of this was to explore the ways in which the behavior of the objects could be used to cue actions, and how easily people could interpret and respond to these cues. In these user trials, all participants are neurotypical and were recruited from students in the Engineering School. Thus, we are not considering the question of how patients might react to the objects in these studies.
