Archive for the ‘Robotics’ Category

Robot cats!

The long-awaited robot cat is available, albeit in an early and rather basic form. It needs to have programmable gestures, by the look of it, to expand the range of actions. Also the different purr types and meows. Though doubtless various toy-hacking nerds are working on that… Not quite as cool as…

Latte artist-of-the-day, delivered by robots

It seems that the robot coffee-froth-art baristas are on their way, though not quite yet in kitchens on the High St. Once the bots are proven in the chain coffee shops and have a central database of latte art designs to choose from, could chains then have a curated “artist of the day”? With the […]

Return of the Flying Circus

The Circus of Drones…

‘You’ll believe a nerd can fly!’

Drone with real-time streaming HD video steady-cam + a connected Oculus Rift = flying like a bird. Or, more likely, Drone Races!

Robot Renaissance Map

Robot Renaissance Map. The PDF link is dead (Web host bandwidth issues, at a guess). It’s also available here.

Geeksworld

Geeksworld looks like an interesting one-day event in Birmingham in September 2010… [ Hat-tip: Nikki Pugh ]

Flowbot

Is it a robot, a vacuum-cleaner, an artwork, a TV, a personal assistant? All of these… and a concept, at present…

RoboThespian

The first 20 seconds of the video are a “teaser”, then the robot really starts acting.

Motion Disabled

Fab! Robots and motion-capture rig art, and premiering in a local art gallery. Motion Disabled opens today at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, … “Artist Simon McKeown’s Motion Disabled, a moving digital sculpture of films recapturing the movements of disabled actors through miniature, skeletal robots, is designed to re-present the ways in which five physically impaired people […]

Center for Future Storytelling

MIT announce a $25m Center for Future Storytelling. No dedicated website yet, but it sounds promising — especially as MIT is generally committed to making its talks, and substantial parts of MIT Press books available online for free.

James yeah?

Custom Toy Lab chooses Birmingham’s ‘James yeah?’ for their first interview… “I’d like to custom something like a … full-size replica robot outfit complete with weapons.” Fight! by ‘James yeah?’. I’m wondering if there’s going to be a cross-over between custom toys and gaming, with people paying to get 3D-printed / hand-finished toy versions of […]

Robo-builders

Rich Press‘s photo-essay on the young robot-building nerds of New York…

Blogging plants

BIAD graduate Andy Broomfield (I supervised his dissertation) has just released source code for a Blog Bot Platform project…. “…an open source platform to allow people to design their own blogging robots” He showed a working prototype in Jan 08 at the Royal College of Art Design Interactions: Work in Progress show… “my first example […]

Googlebots on the moon

Veerryy cool. Googlebots on the moon… “The Google Lunar X Prize is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon” They’ve now signed up and announced ten private teams (from 560 expressions of interest), who should launch in 2012. You may have seen it on durh […]

Design for Life

Inspired by Birmingham’s Design City 08? Design grants of up to £30k are available from the Audi Foundation. The deadline for applications to the Design for Life programme is 31st March 08. On offer are grants of between £10,000 and £30,000… “in order to produce design solutions to enhance the world in which we live”. […]

Toy-hacking

Tinker.it are running toy-hacking workshops in London. Take advantage of all that cheap Chinese tech inside toys, to radically detourn them.

spurtBOT

Just launched: spurtBOT : tracking the ‘robot love, sex & marriage’ meme.

What did you change your mind about in 2007?

The Edge has asked 100 of the English-speaking world’s leading thinkers and writers — “What did you change your mind about in 2007?” Almost all of the comments come from the fields of science and philosophy/theology, but there are some interesting snippets in there… “Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes […]

Arse Electronica

Now there’s an event that should be brought to the West Midlands: the three-day Arse Electronica: pornography and technological innovation. You might chuckle; but some key historical examples show that, given half a chance, pornography will strongly drive the early adoption of a new media technology. Yes; eroticrobot-human marriages may be only a decade or […]

“All your Cultural Studies are belong to us”

Fab academo-geek conference alert: GikII, 19th September 07 in London. “[last year saw] the first workshop in the world where the worlds of law, technology and popular culture came together. We want to discuss whether geek law exists; by the end of the workshop we had created it. Topics covered at the first workshop included […]