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Quasi the Intelligent Robot
Jake David writes to tell us about a uniquely emotive robot — named Quasi — developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations. Here is a a video of the robot in action. Note that the animatronic figure is little more than the emotive organ of the robot, whose entirety encompasses the display booth as well. From the CMU page: "Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae. These combine red, green, and blue LEDs... His antennae can move both forward and backward as well as in and out, giving them an expressive quality not unlike that of a dog's ears."
I think researchers need to stop this sort of research which is based on hollywood science craption and focus on creating things that are actually real...
The stuff being developed at PARC (the same guys who invented windows and the mouse) is far more exciting to me than this. With Modular robotics and digital clay, plus a software development platform, this sort of work promises to provide a revolution similiar to what they did with personal computing.
It just makes me sad every time i see something like this where people have spent years of their lives developing completely dead end technology, in order to produce something that is really nothing more than a stupid high tech gimmick. Mechanical objects that can do nothing other than sing, dance, or make meaningless smalltalk don't impress me.