Category Archives: evil robots

ill robots

While in Inverness I visited the Center for Health Science where I witnessed their state-of-the-art medical simulation equipment, including these incredibly sophisticated (and creepy) medical dummies. Doctors and nurses in training use them to train for real-life scenarios, so these life-like dolls have a temperature, a pulse, a voice and can undergo a number of […]

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alter doodles

No Robots Please! is an elementary school workshop by bioengineer Alan Outten where he introduced children to alternate design concepts and prompted them to invent their own. He began by introducing images mind-altering works such as the Eames’ Powers of Ten, Auger + Loizeau’s Audio Tooth, Raby + Evans’ Meat-eating products and Vacanti’s Human ear […]

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darth vaderama

The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is officially my favorite museum in the world. I was recently treated to the awesome experience of Last Manoeuvres in the Dark by Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni: “Since 2007 Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni have shared an attraction towards community-based practice, bad taste and the different forms of […]

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freaking surveillance

Annina has found a way to confound the watchers and make them think that the machines they are using against us have turned against them. link

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technology for eating alone

when traveling in a foreign country, ordering food can be an adventure. fortunately, japan has a plethora of solutions for avoiding human contact altogether when eating out: the conveyor belt restaurant (above) and the vending machine restaurant (below). in the conveyor belt, a chef prepares small dishes and places them on a conveyor belt that […]

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robot co-pilot

strolling past nissan’s showroom in ginza today i saw an interesting concept reminiscent of the R2D2 + X-wing co-driving model: a ‘future car’ with a robot (similar to papero) embedded in the dashboard as a kind anthropomorphic GPS, a co-pilot, and in any case better than a totally self-driving car because it has a face […]

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dinner demons

do you ever feel like things are out of control? the virtual reality laboratory at tokyo institute of technology (no acronym) have discovered one reason: tiny ‘brownies’ called kobito are pushing stuff around. you can finally see them at work through the newly developed “kobito window,” a screen that shows them pushing your tea around […]

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squishy robots

in the late 1990’s cynthia brezeal pioneered (wrote the book on) ‘sociable robots,’ based on her work with kismet. in reality, robotics was (and remains) far behind special effects houses and toy designers, who for years have been making expressive, emotive puppets specifically for engendering social bonds with animate machines. so it’s no surprise that […]

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