Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.
If an Android is a robot disguised as a human, what is a Geminoid? Similar in concept to the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, a Geminoid is an Android designed to look exactly like its master, and in this case, Geminoid DK is a facsimile of homo sapien Henrik Scharfe, Professor at Denmark's Aalborg University and Ishiguro's cohort.
Ishiguro, Scharfe and team are researching "emotional affordances" in human-robot interaction. From the project site, "Geminoid DK will be the first of its kind outside of Japan, and is intended to advance android science and philosophy, in seeking answers to fundamental questions, many of which that have also occupied the Japanese researchers."
The project poses the following questions:
- What is a human?
- What is presence?
- What is a relation?
- What is identity?
And... How can we make the skin, hair, and movement as eerily realistic as possible? Ishiguro believes that over time he will be able to develop an Android that is indistinguishable from a human, at least in passing. Looks like Geminoid DK is already there.
VIA IEEE Spectrum
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