steve barrett

There’s a whole collection of “segway falls” on youtube and some of these are so entertaining it amazes me they don’t get more exposure. This one’s pretty good - the cape adds some effect but it doesn’t do much in the way of keeping this poor broad upright.

The plan is to drop them from aircraft and annoy everyone on the planet.

Paul Dateh on the Violin & Inka on the tables. This is some sick sound.

This is some pretty cool engineering. The backpack is clunkly looking but I’ll take it, there must be some sort of counterweight in there to keep Murata Boy steady. The technology is probably similar to that of a segway; some sort of gyroscope watching for drift, and then compensating.

Here’s an earlier view, from 2006, that gives some insight into the development process. I think this video’s more exciting than the first because of some of the unique tests they have the robot

It happens to the best of us.

You’re looking at Julio, a robot singing to a recording of David Byrne of the Talking Heads. Julio was built by David Hanson and chronicled on Hanson’s blog. Hanson has a great collection of other videos at his website. David says he designed Julio to study the “uncanny valley.” Instead of giving you a wonky description I’ll just include the wikipedia low-down

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness….

…The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

I find this to be a pretty interesting concept. Something so close to real it’s harder to personify than a cartoon? It’s as though people have an easier time humanizing an object if its obviously not real than they do personifying a 99% accurate recreation.

I posted about Ronald Jenkees a while back, he keeps his youtube page up to date and this is one of his latest. I thought it was worth sharing.

An article published by Washington University in St. Louis claims that the American Military will be roughly 30% robotic by 2020. This includes everything from crawling scouts, unmanned automatic UAVs, self-driving convoys, and job specific bots like the robo dog.

Sounds like a pretty accurate estimate to me.

This one is definitely worth a look. This isn’t computer graphics, its as real as it gets. Apparently its an exhibit at BMW’s museum in Munich. As you can imagine, its obviously computer controlled, most likely hundreds of motors reeling up string that suspends these balls in space. With some advanced animation and programming you can see how cool of an effect it creates.

The BMW Museum itself is a work of art. Created in the shape of a BMW logo there’s no doubt what you’re looking at is a BMW facility.

The TWIP is a photoshop contest based on MSNBC’s “This Week in Pictures” series. Photoshop entries are supposed to be funny and original and somehow incorporate on of the TWIP series photos.

Before:

After: **Click to animate**

Before:

After: **Click to Animate**

Before:

After: