The ghostly face of the Machine

Plotting a course deep in the belly of the Uncanny Valley, the Waseda-Docomo face robot No.2 is a shape-shifting automaton face capable of mimicking any human with an average 3mm of error. An image of the person to be imitated is projected onto the robot face, which then contorts and stretches in a very unsettling manner until a near-perfect doppelgänger is rendered.  Like something out of H. R. Giger’s bad dream.

Here’s the same robot, seen from three different angles, with the facial image overlaid.

1 comment September 20th, 2007