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.

Not The First

[The Wild Norseman]

Actually, the first robot actor ever was Keanu Reeves.

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

[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.