Japanese Develop 'Female' Android

jolyon writes "The BBC is reporting that Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1. 'She' has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet."

Comments

Spacers and Settlers...

[bheer]

The US and Britain have decided that immigration is a better way to solve their labor/population problems since culturally they have a history of dealing with other cultures.

It's no surprise that the ethnically much more isolationist Japanese wouldn't like unskilled immigration all that much, even though they suffer from a much worse population problem. Hence, robots...

(take this sweeping generalization with a grain of salt, just pointing out that you don't need a galaxy to play out some SF themes, Earth is room enough.)

They touched on this in Terminator

[ReformedExCon]

There is a scene in Terminator where the rise of the machines is discussed and how the robots were unable at first to infiltrate the human ranks. The reason was primarily that the rubber skin didn't look sufficiently human to fool real humans.

On the other hand, the animators of Toy Story 2 recognized the problem of human replication as the innate ability of humans to recognize when something is amiss with images of humans that were "too perfect". The result is that they decided to give the human characters in the movie not-so-perfect skin, even down to details like acne and pock marks.

Take the Final Fantasy movie as an example of utterly fake looking CG characters. Everything looks fine, as long as you try to think of the characters as cartoons. However, the instant you think that they are humans, the whole illusion falls apart under its own perfection.

This robot may look human, but any human should be able to recognize it as something "other". As for human movement, the ASIMO is very far along in mimicking human movement.

Uncanny Valley...

[tiluki]

What is more scary is how "respulsed" you might be by it if it were too "hot"...

This research recently backs up the findings of Mori in the '70's into the "Uncanny Valley" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

Some of the videos I've seen of this work are quiet shocking. Some guy can come right up and touch the face and feel the android - which is really realistic - and so goes against every sort of social "personal space" rule (especially if you are Japaneese).

(cue jokes on "valleys"...:-)

Re:I knew someone would bring this up

[tod_miller]

Monkeys look like monkey, not something in the uncanny valley though.

Interesting post, but what youa re saying is, that the uncanny valley is invalid for this type of interaction.

I think people do not 'forget they are interacting with a robot' but this is because the interaction is being forced through unfamiliar terms.

We know how to treat a VCR, an ATM or a computer, but when the inputs are not mechnical, but based on something we have painstakingly developed so not to look weird (i.e. human interaction, vocal intercourse, oh matron) - then we find ourselves trying to deal with the situation in a comfortable way:

1) feel stupid talking to a robot
2) ignore the robot and talk to it like a drive through microphone

Again, I am sure that 5x9's realism will hop over the uncanny valley, but this vacant staring, cold looking skin is close enough to a human that it triggers our 'intepret human' response, and we think, ZOMG look at that freak staring at nothing, and batting her eyelids at me...

Don't worry, I once took a photo of an old guy sat at madam tussauds (I am sure he was planted there, because he sat so still, and his skin didn't look right, as if they had put some off coloured, non-refracting (hard) make-up on him.

So if real people can look fake, then fake things shoudl be able to look real right?