Sun 23 Nov 2008
The uncanny valley is a concept invented by Mori explaining the connection between the similarity between a robot and a human and the comfort or familiarity of the experience.
James Portnow and Daniel Floyd explain the uncanny valley in this excellent video and make some suggestions of how it can be related to modern computer games.
Sat 8 Nov 2008
Another step to become a Cyborg has been introduced by the Japanese company Honda this week. The system helps people walking or crouching by taking away some of the stress from the muscles. It is still in the prototype phase but should soon come on the market in Japan. It is targeted at elderly people or workers with a job that involves a lot of walking or crouching (e.g. in a factory).
And here is the video, how to walk like Asimo, …weird…fits this blog then.
Mon 25 Aug 2008
Cool hack, but maybe it would be more fun as a multiplayer game.
Thu 22 Feb 2007
The promotion video of Plen-the robot became quite popular recently.
Plen is a small Japanese robot, 23cm tall and weighs only 700 grams. It has a powerful 32bit ARM7 processor running at 33MHz, has 18 degrees of freedom (DOFs), an accelerometer and a USB/RS-232C as well as Bluetooth.
The balance of Plen in this video is amazing, but some people claim it’s stop motion videocut.