Dean's World

Bring Out Ze Fembots!

Dean

Man. The Japanese are making talking, breathing, moving mannequins.

Having read about this stuff ever since I was a kid I would not expected to be weirded out by that picture--but I am.

(Via Ace.)

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Bring Out Ze Fembots!

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JoetheFarmer (mail):

But will they be, er, fully functional?

(I'm, um, asking for a friend. Yeah, that's it.)

6.12.2005 3:06pm

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McKiernan:

I once took my son to a zoo in Tokyo. He was very young and so was I. The best part was the mechanical elephant ride. It was about a six foot elephant with a chair on top and a live human elephant trainer had a remote control to direct the elephant's movements.

Those old prototypes never die, they just morph into newer things.

6.12.2005 5:05pm

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triticale (mail) (www):

Joe's friend would be interested to note that the caption specifically mentioned that she moves her mouth.

6.12.2005 8:54pm

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Kevin D:

If I didn't know that she was a mannequin, and I had only seen the photo, my first thought would have been, "Why is that lady in such a weird pose?" Look at her face. Creepily life-like!

So, when can we expect hot Asian ladies from the future to travel back in time to kill... John Connor?

6.13.2005 12:48am

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Sandi (www):

These are the Actroid serries robots, developed by robotic parts maker the Kokoro Co, and an Osaka University team. I posted about them back in March as part of The 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan. They welcomed the millions of guests at the World Exposition with hosts trained to greet them in their language, entertain their children and perform rap music with them.

The "Actroids" are able to recognize 40,000 phrases in four languages, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English. A pretty impressive feat.

Although the movements are a bit robotlike, the end of this clip shows a closeup of eye movements with blinking so real, that it almost raised the hair on the back of my neck.

There are more clips here curtesy of the Kokoro Co.

6.13.2005 4:07am

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Robert Speirs (mail) (www):

Or is it spooky because Western eyes have trouble distinguishing Orientals from robots?

6.13.2005 4:28pm