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Robot Actress Makes Stage Debut In Japan
Robotron23 writes "The BBC reports that a robot named Geminoid-F has made its acting debut (video) in Japan. The short play in which it appeared was a sellout with the Japanese public, who were curious to see the robot's performance. However an actress who co-starred pointed out that the lack of human presence made the droid difficult to act alongside."
The Uncanny Valley Effect is strong with this one.
Japan's population is aging and getting smaller. From Japan's point of view, it makes sense to augment society's ability to cope with the increased workload by developing robots capable of doing a lot of the work.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Or perhaps it wasn't easy for those actors as well.
There's a weird idolization of white people in the Japanese culture that I've noticed among friends from that country. As a culture, they try to emulate whatever's better than them, and for some reason, dropping an atomic bomb on them convinced them that western culture was better.
That said, I do know Japanese people who do have that skin complexion, and the eyes are ambiguous, so there's nothing to say that the robot is supposed to be caucasian at all. It could simply be modeled after a Japanese person who doesn't have slanty eyes... they do exist, you know.