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."

Comments

Acting skills

[AnonymousClown]

The video picks on the android's acting skills, but I tell ya, give her bigger boobs and she'd be a natural for porn!

Oh Yeah! Japanese robot porn!

RULE 34!

And so it began... All My Circuits

[Starteck81]

I would go on to have a thousand and four season run.

Scary

[Yvan256]

The Uncanny Valley Effect is strong with this one.

Not The First

[The Wild Norseman]

Actually, the first robot actor ever was Keanu Reeves.

Re:Not The First

[Hognoxious]

No, it was Chuck Nor@^$
@
no carrier

robot or puppet or android or automaton?

[smoothnorman]

The thing is tethered with all manner of control cables, so it's just a high-tech puppet. Was howdy-doody a "robot"? ...and did buffalo-bob suffer a lack of 'human presence' with the marionette he had to act with?, hell-no. thems was proper saucy-puppet-shows back in the stone age... yep.

Re:What the director said

[mug funky]

if the bot's performance is the sum total of the director's intent, they will suck.

directors prefer certain actors over others because of what they bring and how they interpret the material.

a director that is under the illusion of having complete control is a nightmare to work with, and they produce crap. ...that said, this robot's giving better performances than some i've seen.

Elephant in the room

[0olong]

I don't understand why Japan is so obsessed with creating androids, while (arguably) the most essential technology behind enabling interaction with humans; the AI field of Natural Language Processing is being glossed over (or at least not getting the amount of attention it deserves). Not just computers, but humans too (and Japanese people in particular) tend to have great difficulty handling the barriers that foreign languages pose to vast amounts of useful foreign data. A successful grammar independent NLP framework for data representation, now that should be a goal to focus on. Everywhere, but in particular in insular countries like Japan. Sorry for wandering off topic...

Re:Elephant in the room

[wizardforce]

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.

Re:Elephant in the room

[hitmark]

The natural response to that would be to allow more foreign workers in, but Japan have a very long history of xenophobia. I recall reading about someone that would avoid mentioning what part of the city he lived in, as it used to be the a Korean district in feudal times and still carried a social stigma.

Actually,

[u38cg]

...you're looking for Rossum's Universal Robots, which I am disappointed to note no-one has yet brought up.

Re:Animatroinc

[NoBullet]

Yeah i was about to say this. And Disney's is a helluva lot more impressive. Funny how the japanese version shakes around when it moves its head. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LepI9g62N7o

Re:Not very talented

[am 2k]

Or perhaps it wasn't easy for those actors as well.

Seen better robots at Disney World

[michelcolman]

Seriously, can't they do better than that? A puppet sitting still, slowly moving its arms, lips and eyelids? Remote control from back stage? Did we somehow teleport back 20 years or so? There are already robots that can walk around and do all sorts of movements based on real time autonomous decisions, surely you can make one that does a series of realistic, pre-programmed movements for a play?!

Missed it by 46 years?

[billius]

I fail to see how this is any different than Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which Disney brought to the World's Fair in 1964. I suppose you have the added element of a human actor working alongside the animatronic, but I didn't see anything interesting. Mostly I just found the thing creepy...

I attended this "play"

[stimpleton]

The play went well, and the Robot actress was surprisingly seamless in her role.

There were a few hushed gasps when she snagged her blouse and revealed her arms were, in fact, two "Goal Keeper" Gatling guns, but apart from that, it was an enjoyable display of technology meets art.

Re:Why is that Japanese robot cacasion?

[realityimpaired]

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.