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Should you visit Tokyo's Takashimaya department store by Valentine's Day, you can greet Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoid-F android, who's engaged in a curiously forlorn bit of street theater. More »
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Robot babies are generally all sorts of uncomfortable, but this animatronic tot takes the tungsten-exoskeletoned cake. YouTuber Kitanimboy, who has quite the experience building robotic children for Torchwood and ad campaigns, has recently unveiled this strange cyber-baby skeleton. He won't reveal what job it's for, and we're absolutely fine with that. More »
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Projection people aren't an entirely new phenomenon, but this Mask-bot — a new yammering robo-visage from German and Japanese researchers — was built to give robots emotive faces and to replace conference calls with talking heads. More »
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Remember the Actroid-F, the sympathetic robot built to console you as you pass on to the great beyond? Researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo have created a male counterpart to the Actroid-F, whose upgrades include camera-eyes and a new hairdo. More »
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Professor Chyi-Yeu Lin of the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology has experimented with robot heads before (here's a few of them), and now his team has built a robot that can read music and emote according to the song's lyrics. Too bad this head looks like the Bride of Johnny Cab. More »
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The Japanese pop scene has experimented with both hologram stars and up-and-coming robotic idols. Now the producers of the girl mega-group ABK48 have gone and created a synthetic member, Eguchi Aimi, out of the facial features of the existing starlets. More »
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Last month, Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, Henrik Sharfe of Aalborg University, and an unnamed female participant hauled their Geminoid doppelgangers together for the world's most awkward coffee klatch or, to quote Dr. Sharfe, "a crazy tea party." Indeed! More »
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By now, most of us are resigned to the notion that the Future™ is not going to be everything we were promised by science fiction. We will not be getting our flying cars, wise-cracking robot butlers, immortality pills, or pleasure model replicants any time soon. But while we mourn for everything that science fiction got wrong, let us stop for a moment to ponder the predictions that have come sadly, tragically, laughably true. Sort of. Enter Michael Crichton's 1981 new media techno-thriller classic Looker. More »
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As much as we tease other movies for plunging into the uncanny valley, we're pretty impressed with Tron's CG Jeff Bridges (who rules Tron City with a digital fist). Watch man fight twin/program in the new Tron Legacy trailer. More »
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Meet the Actroid-F, an emotive android that's being tested in some Japanese hospitals to observe patients and make them feel comfortable. Who wouldn't be totally at ease with this happy mechanical mannequin leering over you? More »
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Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University created this Telenoid R1 robot to "transmit the presence" of its user from afar. The Telenoid R1 was designed to be generic as possible, but it also resembles an embryonic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. More »
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The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) just met in Georgia, and some new photos show off the incredible diversity of your future robot overlords. More »
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Roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, famous for creating a robotic duplicate of himself, over the weekend debuted his new female robot. Called Geminoid F, it's designed to smile, laugh, and serve as a remote-controlled emotional avatar. More »
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Are humans doomed to find humanoid robots creepy? The widely-accepted "uncanny valley" hypothesis proposes just that. But when Popular Mechanics did an investigative report on this influential theory, they discovered it's not based any scientific research. More »
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The more realistic a CG human is, the creepier they become. There's nothing spookier than a half-computer half-child CG face on the big screen. We've ranked all the worst CG humans, in order of creepiness. More »
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We're scared of robots that look almost, but not quite, human... because they remind us of walking corpses. And the deadliest killer robots are often the ones which exploit this zombie fear, before slaughtering us. More »
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If you happened to venture to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid this summer, you may have come across Julio, a robot who sings in the voice of former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne while mimicking the facial expressions of a human crooner. Byrne has chronicled the process of conceiving and creating Julio on his blog, where he also discusses the significance of imitative robots, the uncanny valley, and machines and the soul. Click through for Byrne’s thoughts and a video of the vaguely creepy automaton. More »
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