Here it is, the Rob Thomas, “Lonely No More” Music Video I have been looking for forever. Amazing re-programmable space. Just leave the sound off.

If you know who made this please let me know.

There’s no more natural control interface than yourself. This robot, developed by engineer Tsuyoshi Horo at Tokyo University, watches you with an array of eight cameras and creates a 3D model of your body. If you point your finger, the cameras will recognize the shape, and send commands to the robot to respond to your gesture. It’s way cool, but it’s not exactly portable, since the cameras are stationary. It’s able to do all kinds of things besides robot control; here’s a video of someone playing Half-Life 2 with body motions:

see website here

AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior.

The lamp’s design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp’s “objectness”, I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.

The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring.

website link here

video link here

MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic and his team of researchers behind the latest wireless electricity scheme have demoed their magnetically coupled resonator technology on a 60-watt lightbulb that wasn’t plugged in. This new technology is called WiTricity. WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects.

Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. “The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations,” Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.

The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.

more info here

link to art piece (art piece pictured above) here

Reconfigurable House is built by Usman Haque and Adam Somlai-Fischer and is currently located n Tokyo, Japan until March 2008 as part of NTT ICC 10th anniversary celebrations.

The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing “smart homes”, which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY.

Smart homes actually aren’t very smart simply because they are pre-wired according to algorithms and decisions made by designers of the systems, rather than the people who occupy the houses.

In contrast to such homes, which are not able to adapt structurally over time, the many sensors and actuators of Reconfigurable House can be reconnected endlessly as people change their minds so that the House can take on completely new behaviors.

see video here

Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan have created a chair that has the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct itself. The robot chair can fall apart spontaneously, and then drag itself across the floor and reassemble.

see video here