The robot's eyes flick towards me, and its head turns, eyebrows raised, lips forming a smile, as if we are about to meet and start a conversation.
In the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, I am a little disconcerted by my first encounter with an intelligent machine.
The robot's head is attached to a box rather than a body and looks more like something from a mannequin than a human.
The rational part of me knows all too well that this is simply a bundle of plastic and silicon.
"Hello, do you want to play a game?" it asks.
The facial features - the agility of the eyes, cheeks and mouth - are projected on to the inside of a translucent skull, and the movements seem to work very fluently.
And something about the machine's gaze - along with dozens of tiny adjustments of its face - is clearly connecting with some element of my subconscious because I am far more convinced than I had thought possible. And very slightly unnerved, too.
What this means, in the brave new world of robotics, is that I have entered what scientists call the "uncanny valley", a state of uncertainty and discomfort about the nature of the entity I am talking to.
As the technology and software come closer to achieving some kind of human mimicry, understanding this strange mental zone is crucial to making robots more acceptable.
And that is something advocates of robotics are determined to do - partly because huge new markets for robots have opened up and partly because there are all kinds of tasks that machines can do more safely than us