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Uncanny Valley

You won't be the life of the party with this shoulder robot

Got a chip on your shoulder, pal? Or is that just a 20-axis humanoid telepresence robot?

For cyber-boffins from Japan's Yamagata University, it's the latter. It seems this creepy little golem has been riding around on shoulders in northern Japan, probably freaking citizens out.

The project, dubbed the MH-2 wearable communication robot, was recently presented at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in St. Paul, Minn., where it turned some heads.

As IEEE Spectrum tells us, the MH-2 is a telepresence robot that acts as an avatar for your friends around the world. With its intricate parallel wire mechanisms and 20 axes of motion, it can reproduce their movements in a realistic fashion.

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Fleshless robot baby would do Skynet proud

"Eraserhead" baby, meet your match.

It seems engineers and tinkerers never tire of creating horrific human simulacra in robot baby form, or even robot fetus form. But the sheer nightmarish genius of this latest unholy spawn gives one pause. Behold it in the video below.

The silently mewling babe is a collection of whirring servomotors and flailing claw-arms, seemingly powered by unseen mechanisms beneath its blanket.

Its movements are perfectly lifelike, and yet its appearance is so alien-death machine-like that I get an overwhelming urge to cast it far into the Uncanny Valley from whence it came.

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Singing robot head could do duets with Chucky

I will never, ever let this disembodied robot head sing me to sleep.

And it's not just because she sings like a cross between Actroid F and Alvin and the Chipmunks. It's because she stares straight through you with those unblinking black eyes, looking like she could lunge at your neck with her big robot teeth at any moment.

Our terror aside, the robot head out of Taiwan does have talent. Unlike other singing robots, or even the singing robot mouth, she can read music. She does so by photographing a musical score with cameras built into her eyes. An algorithm extracts the pitch, rhythm, and lyrics and sends it to the robot's voice synthesizer.

And she doesn't just sit there singing robotically, either. Her motor-driven facial expressions apparently change automatically to match the emotions of a song's lyrics.

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Humanoid bot greets guests at Tokyo store

A female android developed at Tokyo University of Science has been working as a receptionist at a department store in the Japanese capital.

Saya, an air-servo-powered robot created by Professor Hiroshi Kobayashi, just finished a stint greeting customers at Takashimaya, one of the most prestigious retailers in Japan.

Saya can interact with people by responding to questions posed through a microphone. Decked out in a Takashimaya jacket and hat along with makeup by RMK, she directed customers to the appropriate floor of the retailer's flagship store in the Nihonbashi district.

Saya has about 700 programmed voice responses, including small more

Uncanny valley of keyboards: Do small keys bother you?

In testing Lenovo's IdeaPad S10-2 and IdeaPad S12 Netbooks this week, an interesting thought occurred to us. Technically, both laptops are nearly similar inside: Intel Atom N270 processors, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive. What differentiates them more than anything else are their screen sizes (10.2 inch and 12.1-inch) and their keyboards.

While screen size has been often discussed among Netbook owners, keyboard size and comfort hasn't as much. And, to a degree, it's the only true factor differentiating smartphones and Netbooks as far as interface is concerned. The real advantage to Netbooks is that you can type on them, like a laptop. But here's the question: are almost-regular size keyboards more difficult to use than intentionally small keyboards on MIDs and smartphones? Click through to hear us out. more

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