Click to viewWe’ve shown you Jules the robotic head before, but now a team of scientists have added real-time human expression mimicking—and taken him marching right across uncanny valley. A team at the University of Bristol, UK, have combined Jules with some analytical software that looks at a person’s face and tweaks Jules’ 34 servos to copy their expression. The results are like a physical version of the software ‘bot Emily we showed you a few months ago…but combined with Jules’ real 3D rubber head it’s a scary, and I mean scary, taste of what our future robot masters servants will behave like. There’s another even scarier vid, just for Halloween.Click to view“Researchers rarely shower!” Scary stuff indeed. Let’s hope that the ‘bots get better at smiling before we start incorporating them into healthcare or childcare environments, eh? [NewScientist]
