Palm OS Powered Tattooing Robot Debuts in Vienna

Makarand writes "Ananova has an article on the world's first tattooing robot. An Austrian electrician, after being left with some permanent reminders of his tattooing robot project, has unveiled his creation at a hi-tech fair in Vienna. He said that he had to test it on himself to get the robot do the right thing and has not recieved any complaints from volunteers who got a tattoo for free at the trade fair."

Comments

Tattoo looks really really bad

[TracerJPN_USMC]

Is it just me, or does that tattoo look really bad? It looks like something a little kid would draw on some paper, why would somebody want that on their body for the rest of their lives??

A perfect circle, can it be done?

[JanMark]

I wonder if the resolution on a Palm Pilot is high enough to do
some serious tattooing. But the real win would be full colour
tattoos. I have to wonder about precision though (just look at
the picture, the Palm screen differs form the tattoo on the arm)
I do not see any form of feedback. Since the skin has moving
muscles underneath it, I think feedback is necessary to keep a
tattoo consistent. Just imagine tattooing a big circle, start at
the top and go clockwise. Will there be a (perfect) circle or
will it be a C line shape or spiral? I would not give my right
arm for it to be a perfect circle... Would you?

Tattoos are artwork

[Moderation abuser]

The quastion is, do you want an original hand made one, or a printout, permanently etched into your skin.

Use soaked leather, not your arm!

[JanMark]

Mr Passath said: "It was a hard job because the only person I could test it on was myself which was painful but a good incentive to get it right as soon as possible.
You have to wonder, Mr Passath is clever enough to design a tattooing robot, but why is he not clever enough to test it with a pen, transparent ink, or on soaked leather? I am not a tattoo specialist but this would work too, would it not?

Gee, and the tattoos are FREE?

[MacAndrew]

How generous! They always give out the samples for free. And how much does the robotic tattoo remover cost? (See Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches .)

Who the heck volunteers for these things? No matter how confident you are in a complete stranger covered with screwed-up tattoos in a booth, do you know tattoos are murder to get rid of? I guess the risk looks pretty small compared to a robotic vasectomy or X-piercing machine, powered by an OS popularly associated with corrupted address books.

And while you're here, we need some volunteers to test the experimental anthrax vaccine... No, it's OK, 3 out of 4 sheep live to say it's da bomb.

Ananova

[DoorFrame]

Does anyone else disbelieve every single story they read on Ananova? Just wondering. As far as I can tell they're one step up from the Weekly World News.

Re:Heres the problem,

[Fnkmaster]

Eh. If you read the article you'll see that it CLAIMS that the tattoo-bot creates its own designs. As in some sort of wacky design generation procedure. You don't actually get to pick a design at all. The idea of a tattoobot is kinda cool in some ways, but the idea that I'd let a pseudorandomly generated design that a fucking Palm Pilot came up with be permanently etched on my skin is so laughable as to not even qualify for being funny.

In short, this story is either pure fiction, stretched from truth until it was barely recognizable or just outright bollocks. I'm sure you could find volunteers to get tattoos from a machine if they could pick it, but who is gonna wander by a booth at some show and say, gee, it seems like a great idea to get a randomly generated crooked-ass-R shape tattooed onto my arm permanently. Might as well let a meat grinder make a random design on your hand.