 balthazarus says: Jules is an animatronic head produced by US roboticist David Hanson, who builds uniquely expressive, disembodied heads with flexible rubber skin that is moved by 34 servo motors. Human face movements are picked up by a video camera and mapped onto the tiny electronic motors in Jules' skin. The Bristol team developed its own software to transfer expressions recorded by the video camera into commands to make those servos produce similarly realistic facial movements. However, because the robot's motors are not identical to human facial muscles, some artistic licence was required. After filming an actor making a variety of expressions indicating, say, "happiness", an expert animator selected 10 frames showing different variations of the expression and manually set the servos in Jules's face to match. Jules' human appearance makes getting the expressions perfect even more critical, to avoid the notorious "uncanny valley". This describes the way that human-like robots or animations that are not quite true-to-life are perceived as unnerving, while less realistic versions, perhaps looking very mechanical, are less alarming. "We are really attuned to how a face moves, and if it's slightly wrong, it gives us a feeling that the head is somehow creepy," explains Neill Campbell, who led the research. Fake friends"Research has shown that if you have a robot that has many human-like features, then people might actually react negatively towards it," Interesting. it is a point that reflects some... Some more from the artcle: ""If you expose vulnerable people, like children or elderly people, to something that they might mistake for human, then you would automatically encourage a social relationship," she told New Scientist. "They might easily be fooled to think that this robot not only looks like a human and behaves like a human, but that it can also feel like a human... and that's not true." Is it??? That is AWESOME. And funny. They're getting so much better at robotics. |
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