Collaborate Disseminate
Last week I was sitting in a waiting room when the news came across my phone that Ingenuity, the helicopter that NASA put on Mars three years ago, would fly …read more Continue reading In Defense of Anthropomorphizing Technology
There are a few things historically difficult to make a robot do. Stairs, of course, are the obvious problem. But realistic blinking behavior is harder than you might think. At …read more Continue reading Never Stare Down a Robot
We all get a bit lonely from time to time and talking to other humans can be a challenge. With social robots still finding their way these days, [Markus] decided …read more Continue reading It’s Nice Having Someone To Talk To
We all seem to intuitively know that a lot of what we do online is not great for our mental health. Hang out on enough social media platforms and you can practically feel the changes your mind inflicts on your …read more
Continue reading Machine Learning Helps You Track Your Internet Misery Index
In this special episode, Chris Hadnagy joins Maxie Reynolds to talk about the amazing stories and useful lessons contained in Chris’s new book: “Human Hacking: Win Friends, Influence People, and Leave Them Better Off for Having Met You”. Listen as Chri… Continue reading Ep. 137 – Human Hacking With Chris Hadnagy
There are so many important design decisions behind a robot: battery, means of locomotion, and position sensing, to name a few. But at a library in Helsinki, one of the most surprising design features for a librarian’s assistant robot was googly eyes. A company called Futurice built a robot for …read more
Continue reading Your Next Robot Needs Googly Eyes, And Other Lessons from Disney
Researchers plotted “vocal bursts” on a map, and found that we experience around 24 nonverbal emotions. Continue reading This Interactive Map of Human Emotional Sounds Is Both Horny and Horrifying
A web search for “Uncanny Valley” will retrieve a lot of information about that discomfort we feel when an artificial creation is eerily lifelike. The syndrome tells us a lot about both human psychology and design challenges ahead. What about the opposite, when machines are clearly machines? Are we all clear? It turns out the answer is “No” as [Christine Sunu] explained at a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup. (Video also embedded below.)
When we build a robot, we know what’s inside the enclosure. But people who don’t know tend to extrapolate too much based only on the simple behavior they …read more
Continue reading Emotional Hazards That Lurk Far From The Uncanny Valley
The bad news is that when our robot overlords come to oppress us, they’ll be able to tell how well they’re doing just by reading our facial expressions. The good news? Silly computer-vision-enhanced party games!
[Ricardo] wrote up a quickie demonstration, mostly powered by OpenCV and Microsoft’s Emotion API, that scores your ability to mimic emoticon faces. So when you get shown a devil-with-devilish-grin image, you’re supposed to make the same face convincingly enough to fool a neural network classifier. And hilarity ensues!
What’s particularly cool about the game is that [Ricardo] was inspired to write it by reading Hackaday, …read more
It’s getting easier and easier to add machine intelligence to your hacks, even to the point where you sometimes don’t have to install any special software. In this case [Dexter Industries] has added the ability to read human emotions to their EmpathyBot robot by making use of Google Cloud Vision.
Press a button on the robot and it moves forward until it’s a certain distance from an object. It then takes a picture and sends it off to Google Cloud Vision along with a request to do face detection. The response that Google returns is in JSON format and, if …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi Robot That Reads Your Emotions
