Teletubbies? No, real research at Georgia Tech. The cat is supposedly displaying the following "emotions," from left: anger, happiness, disgust, and fear.
(Credit: Georgia Tech)If you can't determine the emotional states expressed by this virtual robot, chances are you might be an older adult, according to a study by Georgia Tech.
You might also have trouble serving our future robot overlords. But I digress.
In a rather strange study, researchers in the school's Human Factors and Aging Laboratory tested people's ability to gauge the emotional state of a robot by presenting them with a virtual feline displaying seven emotional states at various levels of intensity: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutrality.
Graduate student Jenay Beer tested adults' ability to read a robot's expressions.
(Credit: Georgia Tech)The groups consisted of adults between the ages of 65 and 75 and teens and adults between the ages of 18 and 27. The researchers found that the older cohorts had more difficulty recognizing anger, fear, and happiness in the robot cat, confusing happiness with its neutral state.
But problems with programming the robot to express an accurate representation of emotion might be the cause of the discrepancy between age groups. We may indeed be able to read robot "emotions," but only if they simulate our own feelings well enough.
While you might wonder why anyone would be studying robot emotions in the first place--especially when the robocat makes such simplistic expressions--the researchers believe that if robots are going to become commonplace in our society, we must be able to read their faces well to get along with them.
The iCat character is a virtual version of the iCat robot developed by Philips Research as an intelligent agent.
Poor little keys :(
I guess I know nothing about Italian culture. Why is this appealing again?
From the "how is it that this is coming out of Italy and not Japan" part of the Web comes the Emoticon Keyboard, or as it's formally known, "Bajca: The Emotional Communication."
This is basically a keyboard that plugs into your USB slot and can be used to type emoticons. I mean why waste time typing out carats, colons, dashes, and parentheses when one button from the emo keyboard can do it all for you?
Also, depending on how sturdy these things are, you could even smash your emotions out if said emotions call for it.
Also, in a crazy, quirky, multipurpose turn of events, each emoticon ball can be removed from the keyboard and used as jewelry. From the pics, it looks like you'll be able to wear the little guys around your neck, wrist, or finger.
Seriously, this was made in Japan and just licensed by an Italian company, right?
I mean check out this quote from the press materials. "Is the essential object, that should already exist. The need has always been there, just not realized. We'll exchange feelings, live and tell stories about our lives. Now our new dictionary, our way to live and tell will be with small touch buttons of plastic. What an emotion!!!"
Every quirky Japanese company out there should be suing these guys.
(Credit:
Dvice)
It's kind of scary how some cameras today can determine when to fire off the shutter based on external factors like a smile or a blink of the eye. More and more, control is being left to the device, and now German designer Akbiyik Volkan has conceptualized a shooter that seems to be able to function on its own and takes pictures depending on your mood and emotion.
From the pictures, the Camoria concept looks like it's meant to worn over the ear like a hearing aid, as seen on Dvice. A tiny lens facing the direction you're looking at snaps the shot. While Volkan did not mention how he intended to make the gadget recognize emotions, we think the small bumps inside the gizmo will detect heat and maybe heart rate: Seeing your crush may make you blush; getting angry makes your heart palpitate faster.
This means the snapper will capture the moment everytime you feel an emotion. If the Camoria doesn't have a memory expansion slot, Volkan should look to implement one for those with mood swings.
(Source: Crave Asia)
(Credit:
Inventor Spot)
Thanks to global warming, you needn't spend a fortune on a personal media player to make an impression, at least on the West Coast. In fact, your PMP can even be kind of clunky and not pack the most impressive features. It just has to be green.
Few can make that claim better than eMotion's solar-powered player, which was first shown at CES in January but is now available for purchase at $169. Inventor Spot wasn't terribly impressed with its specs--especially storage, or lack thereof--but how many times do you need to watch An Inconvenient Truth anyway? Besides, you can play some old-school Sega games on it for the full retro-treehugger effect.
Dinosaurs are known for a lot of things, but cuddly emotionalism isn't one of them
Ugobe will try to change that next year with "Pleo," an animatronic robotic dinosaur that reacts emotionally to its surroundings. If you talk cooingly to it, Pleo becomes more responsive, wagging its tail and offering to shake hands. But if you're curt, it can get depressed (the back slumps, it emits a mooing sound, the tail wags plaintively).
(Credit:
Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)
"You can consider it more of a lifelike creature than a toy," said CEO Bob Christopher in an interview in our offices. "We're kind of putting psychology back into robots."
So far cute and cuddly robots have died quick and horrific deaths in the market. But Pleo has a couple of things going for it. One, it's going to be relatively cheap. It will cost around $250 when it hits shelves in the second quarter next year, a lot less than the Aibo and several other failed companion robots.
Second, Ugobe will try to go beyond selling a robot that will essentially be a walking, talking toy. The company will publish a developer's kit and open its source code so others can tinker with its software. Consumers will be able to download personality modules so you can make your Pleo happy or bipolar. There will also be modules for doing tricks.
Someday, a third party or Ugobe could even come out with navigation devices so that you could program the Pleo to push a door open or perform some other task. WowWee has succeeded with RoboSapien, after all.
The Pleo, by the way, is anatomically correct. A paleontologist helped design it. It resembles a 1-week old Camarasaurus, a cow-like dinosaur from the Jurassic period.
We'll have a video and more details next week on News.com.
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