Slashdot Mirror
Dancing Robots Help Preserve Japanese Culture
Neil Halelamien writes "As reported on robots.net and other sources, researchers at Tokyo have used the HRP-2 Promet humanoid robot to help preserve moves from ancient Japanese dance for future generations. The researchers used motion capture to record the movements of a dancing master, then encoded and replayed them on the robot. The HRP-2 Promet robots are themselves quite interesting, capable of standing up after lying down and non-autonomously operating a backhoe. The external appearance was created by a designer known for his work on several anime series."
I for one CANNOT welcome some japanese dancing fairy robots as my overlords. Maybe if they were veritech and at least transformed, but these robot overlords are way to geisha for me.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Couldn't they just record the moves for now and use whatever robots the "future generation" has?
Do the do DDR?
Okay, IDNRTFA - but the sheer idea of something like this is a testimony of where we are heading on this planet. A dance is a cultural heritage that should be preserved by human beings, not by robots, otherwise it loses its meaning. If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out - and I'm definitely not a Luddite - just something sick about this...
...kill all the humans. Step, step, turn, shuffle, kill all the humans...
To me, it seems like motion capture is not quite enough. To truely record a dance, you'd need multiple angle video capture, along with motion capture, and save it in a raw format on several servers, so that in the future, you don't have the dance altering, as too little movement was actually captured by our young, and very primative robots. The more raw data collected, the more accurate the dance will be for comming generations. Several capture techniques should be used in any such preservation.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Video preservation not enough?
There are plenty of robots in music, like these, admittedly for a different purpose. This article in the New York Times talks robots in art, and about this all-robot concert at Juilliard.
What is the world coming to?
This is the funniest thing i have read on Slashdot in over a year.
And as an Asian who is somewhat involved in Japanese cultural presentations, I find it hilarious.
Optimus Prime has prior art, right here.
(warning: large flash site)
Reading this article gave me an idea:
I'm an avid swing dancer. In order to effectively learn new moves, I either have to see a video or have somebody teach me. With the video, I can replay it as many times as I want, but I only get one 2D angle. With a teacher I can appreciate the full 3D movement, but if I try to get them to replay too many times they get annoyed and smack me.
There's things like the Jiveoholic Dance Step Database, which is useful by limited to 2D.
Perhaps motion capture could be the best of both worlds? I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to capture the moves of expert swing dancers, and then have a piece of software to replay their movements in 3D. A user of the software could replay moves to their heart's content, switching to arbitrary angles. If robots like the HRP-2 ever become cheap and flexible enough, such motion capture could even be used to replay moves on the bots.
Some folks at MIT made a very rudimentary "swing dancing" robot arm, which provides swing dance leads. I wonder how long it'll be until we see humanoid robots capable of leading, or maybe even interpreting hand signals from a human and being capable of following.
Alright you want to make a robot that does a traditional dance. Fine I guess that has an appeal but don't pretend it is to preserve japanese culture, unless that is the culture of making crazy electronic gadgets. After all DVDs and Movies of *people* are alot easier to imitate than dancing robots.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Is it because I'm living in Japan and out of sync with all of you?
Living in Japan... out of sync...? Nice try, robot scum -- you'll never take us alive!
Just like a goddamn robot to go for first post...
My good friends who work in Robotics here in Japan all tell me the same thing: the Japanese robotics market is all about smooth motor skills and balance. Honda, Toyota, and Nissan have all the heavy-lifting industrial monsters they want, and they have the laser-precises lathes and machines for the exacting stuff. What is missing is the "human" element-- graceful walking and interfacing with humans. This is seen as the barrier to cross into the mass market-- your grandmother won't buy a robot until it can walk and talk like the pet pooch.
I wrote a short article about this market, and how Linux is dealing with it.
davejenkins.com |
Wasn't it in one of the later Foundation novels that Isaac Asimov had a troupe of robots performing folk dances in the interests of keeping the dances "alive"?
Just another nail in the coffin of good predictive SciFi, I guess.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Quick correction about the "Sudden IQ drop among the 'tech-bloggers' when robots are mentioned..." post: the link is actually here.
It's amazing how accurately the plyojump blog entry describes the posts in this discussion. I really should've linked to it in my original submission.
It's much worse than that. Slashdot and most other tech sites only report on feats like this one. There's no reporting done on the actual science or the breakthroughs of robotics. For example, I was honestly surprised a month ago to learn of the invention of Scale Invariant Feature Transforms last year. This awesome computer vision technique allows a robot to recognise objects based on key features of the object, in real time, with minimal training. This means you could have a robot that can learn to associate an utterance for "ball" with a ball and then pick the ball from a collection of similar or dissimilar objects on command. There is already another paper which extends this work to incorporate background invariance into the transformation so the robot would be able to find the object in real live situations using uncallibrated cameras. There's even an open source library for performing these kinds of transformations.. unfortunately about the only use it appears to be getting is in creating panaroma images. Feature recognition on entire scenes could just as easily be used for navigation in a mobile robot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Feel glad waltz isn't part of Japanese culture. .. stamp 200 pound steel foot down on human partner's leg ...wait for "AAAAAGHHHH" ... step... turn ... step ... stamp foot ....
Step... turn