DailyDirt: Making Artificial People Look Less Creepy…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
If we’re going to have armies of robot servants, we probably shouldn’t make them look like scary terminator exoskeletons or creepy rubber-skinned mannequins. It’s actually not that easy to avoid the uncanny valley, but that difficulty isn’t going to prevent folks from trying to create ever more life-like (yet fake) people. Here are just a few links pointing to some cool projects to design our artificial replacements.
- In about ten years, computer-generated images (rendered in real time) might be nearly indistinguishable from live action video. This CGI prediction comes from an employee at Industrial Light & Magic — but will the uncanny valley really disappear over the next few years? [url]
- Disney Research is working on ways to make robots behave in a more human-like way, and one of the actions they’ve figured out is a hand-off between a robot and a human. If a robot blindly sticks its arm out and a person has to place an object into a mechanical hand, the interaction feels very unnatural. But if the robot anticipates the hand-off with some trained gestures, the transfer won’t be as off-putting. [url]
- Disney is also working on robots that can be 3D printed quickly and operate with just one motor instead of using more complicated mechatronics. The robots are limited to cyclical motions, but it’s still quite impressive how natural the movements can be when a few gears are appropriately positioned to generate animated actions. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: animation, cgi, creepy, gesture, graphics, mechanical hand, mechatronics, robot, uncanny valley
Companies: disney, ilm
Comments on “DailyDirt: Making Artificial People Look Less Creepy…”
Robots will always be creepy....
Robots are getting better but they’ll never know how to interact with people like people do.
Re: Robots will always be creepy....
Who knows they may be able to interact with people better than people some day.
always creepy and will never move right
Try to stand a GI Joe or Barbie doll on two legs. It’s almost impossible. Locomotion on two legs requires a crazy amount of data processing. Just now my wife handed me a cup of hot tea. The amount of data she and I had to process to pass the cup without spilling (she had to sense when to release the cup, I had to sense that she was sensing and so on) is so far beyond what machines will be able to do for the foreseeable future.
Maybe after the singularity robots will be able to move like humans. But considering the enormous problems the world is facing with economic disparity, and the political collapse that its causing, I doubt we’ll get there in any of our lifetimes.
If we’re going to get to a point where robots can move like humans, we’re going to first have to fix what we’ve fucked up regarding humans.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
How much $ for natalie portman model?
In about ten years? I was thinking more like 23 minutes into the future.