One is live. One is an android double.
Guess which is which, before looking below.
This demo was delayed by a couple days as the android was held up in customs!
He must not have passed that Turing test…
And from his construction… Taking a head mold
Then six months of work to get the details and hairs right
Like humans, all eyes are blue until the brown pigment arrives. In this case, the eyes and mouth string are reference points for the mechanical design:
And a couple close-up shots I took:
Here is a mechanical test video from the Danish Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology.
"In a sense, the head is like a photo. It is a representation of something else. But the nature of the 3D scuplture in near-organic skin texture makes this representation something else. In certain ways we can almost say that the design of the head paves the road for a display of personality. In the same sense as a really succesfull photo may capture the personality of a person, this model can also capture aspects of personality traits."
And for those unfamiliar with the photo caption….
Rapid blinking is weird, but also the skin-tone isn’t quite right. It’s well shaded, but it just seems to lack luminosity. Without watching the video first I can tell who is real and who is not in the photograph (even with the focus point of the camera being only on one of "them") within a few seconds.
Connecting with…
Deckard: She’s a replicant, isn’t she?
Tyrell: I’m impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?
Deckard: I don’t get it, Tyrell.
Tyrell: How many questions?
Deckard: Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced.
Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn’t it?
Deckard: [realizing Rachael believes she’s human] She doesn’t know.
Tyrell: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?
—Blade Runner
Got to see the demo at TEDx Brussels last November, and as I was walking around backstage I got to see the BOX… no wonders why he had trouble with customs this time. When I saw the size of it, I was expecting a few of them at least… we don’ t realise it but the hardware for operating is huge…
Something cool I came across latter on you may find cool :
"While the Geminoid DK is not as…uh…sexy (?) as its female brothers and sisters, it may be the most realistic A.I. ever created. (Barring of course, Al Pacino’s creation in “Simone” or Kelly LeBrock in “Weird Science.”) And being too realistic to be attractive would fit perfectly into science’s concept of the uncanny valley..
Those unfamiliar with the concept of uncanny valley can refer to this handy chart by Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato in Android Science. Basically: If a robot or alien or any non-human looks vaguely humanish, it can be cute/sexy/totally fine. But get too close to human resemblance without being 100 percent man-droid, and our “familiarity” (i.e. sexual attraction) with the entity takes a sharp plummet.
The Geminoid DK robot digs into the uncanny valley (Salon-com)
Ho and here is the family reunion =)
"This is the first time that the 3 Geminoid robotic family meet together with their human counterparts. "it was a crazy tea party”. With Geminoid F, Geminoid HI-1, and Geminoid DK met their original humans, an anonymous young lady, Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, and Prof. Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University, in Denmark."
After looking at these two guys for hours, I finally foud the difference. One has an invisible soul and the other….is of plastic. Jocking, realy amazing. I just showed Epp the video and we are wowed. Thanks for this one Steve.
denis
Maybe we’ll be lucky and something like the Black Plague of the 13th century will come a long and put an end to this kind of stuff… I don’t think peak oil would be enough to do the job.
A new study on the uncanny valley, from CNN:
"What do zombies and androids have in common? They’re almost human, but not quite. That disconnect is creepy, in a way that scientists are searching to understand.
Saygin and colleagues published a study last year using functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI), looking at what’s happening in the brain that might explain the uncanny valley phenomenon. They hypothesized that, at least in part, the effect might result from a violation of the brain’s predictions. When we anticipate one thing but see another, we get an error, and that error makes us shy away from the thing we’re viewing.
Something interesting emerged in the results: "The network that normally processes your body movements is more active when you view an android," compared with when you look at a stripped-down robot or a human, Saygin explains. This could be because the brain has to combine conflicting information…
when a very human-looking head is placed on an obviously mechanical body, that can be creepy. So can a human face with robotic eyes. "When there are elements that are both human or nonhuman, this mismatch can produce an eerie sensation in the brain," MacDorman said. "It’s when different parts of the brain are coming to different conclusions at the same time."
I’ve seen those examples…
. 
This explanation for the uncanny valley resonates with Jeff Hawkins’ description of the cortex:
“The brain does not ‘compute’ the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory… The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.”
Rather than a behavioral or computation-centric model, Hawkins presents a memory-prediction framework for intelligence. The 30 billion neurons in the neocortex provide a vast amount of memory that learns a model of the world. These memory-based models continuously make low-level predictions in parallel across all of our senses. We only notice them when a prediction is incorrect. Higher in the hierarchy, we make predictions at higher levels of abstraction (the crux of intelligence, creativity and all that we consider being human), but the structures are fundamentally the same.
More specifically, Hawkins argues that the cortex stores a temporal sequence of patterns in a repeating hierarchy of invariant forms and recalls them auto-associatively. The framework elegantly explains the importance of the broad synaptic connectivity and nested feedback loops seen in the cortex. (from my blog on this)
This is brilliant, and the connections are great. Thanks for sharing Steve !
I can see ERROR message all over Google Glasses while walking in the street… or your office O=)
Yes, very cool…especially like your j-curve part, have not had a chance to read this particular post before…felt similar way…the amount of information, data, knowledge has exploded…we have to keep ip with it…given the nature of our curiosity without boundaries…memory becomes a bottleneck…especially active memory…I can extract maybe small percent from what is in the passive to active…we will need tools to expand ourselves rather soon in this area… Also find flickr as amazing as always as a way to train ones creativity and awaken imagination…together with learning about many fun things at once, this is one great example… I am thankful for our little virtual community here:):)
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonquantique] — Oh that is so funny. And it just so happens that I will be meeting Cameron on the set of Avatar 2. He is hunkered down, writing the script for 2 and 3 right now. Rumors from the submarine community is that they will be partially filmed underwater (to help fund his explorations, just like he did with Titanic).
Amazing video on this subject, posted by Reese Jones on facebook today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wt9cBJX8Ww
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