From beyond the Uncanny Valley comes this disturbing creation, the mutant hybrid lovechild of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Dren from Splice.

The portable machine features a soft silicone body that is pleasant to the touch, and it uses 9 actuators to move its eyes, mouth, head and rudimentary limbs

Now, trust me.. in an earlier experiment in journalism I hung out in a warehouse in Japan where they made fuckable mannequins.. these don’t stand a chance. Sure, they’re built for telepresence…

The robot’s actions mirror those of the remote user, whose movements are monitored by real-time face tracking software on the user’s computer. Users can also transmit their voice through the robot’s embedded speakers.

.. but you just know they’ll have preset ‘routines’ or have playable ‘games’ for them, soon enough too.

More details over on Pink Tentacle.

On sale now, from $US 8K for the low-end model, to $US 35K for the deluxe.

via JWZ

From PinkTentacle:

With 30 motors in her body, the 158-centimeter (62-in) tall, 43-kilogram (95-lb) HRP-4C can walk around and strike a range of poses.

The black-haired robot also has 8 motors in her face, allowing her to wow the crowds with expressions of simple emotions like anger and surprise.

Really? This is the state-of-art?!

Well, more accurately, it’s the best realization yet of Japan’s obsession with creating a ‘living doll’.

I look at this video and all I can think of is Stross’s Saturn’s Children (oh hai Big Slow!) .

I’m sure there’s a few augmented Roomba’s that would like to show this robot what the state-of-the-art really looks like.

Meets Jules:

Developed at Bristol University, UK, in partnership with Hanson Robotics, as an attempt to bridge the Uncanny Valley by giving a robot realistic human facial expressions.

After filming an actor making a variety of expressions indicating, say, “happiness”, an expert animator selected 10 frames showing different variations of the expression and manually set the servos in Jules’s face to match.

This next video shows the process in slightly more detail:

This could also be used for some damn spooky teleconferencing, don’t you think?