Human Study

     This past week, I went to the Interactive Wonderspaces Museum in Scottsdale, and found something that took me by surprise. There was this attraction called the Human Study by Patrick Tresset and it was a machine or set of machines that worked in collaboration to draw photos of humans. 


    According to Patrick Tresset's website, it's a form of arm where the human becomes an actor. As seen in the picture above, the actor is placed in a seat in front of multiple robots and are woken up by an assistant. The robots are all identical except their eyes, which are either digital cameras or webcams. The object of the human study is to create robots that are minimal in design that are capable of drawing from observation. The drawing style of the robots is very minimal and looks like sketches. I think the most interesting thing is how the robot moves. It comes off as very human in the way it will move its up eye and down from the human to the paper and adjust its arm accordingly to draw. 

    According to an article by Damith Herath and co., It uses the camera the take real time pictures of the human to input into a computer program to know how and where to draw. Aside from the physical aspect of the drawing, the robot can solicit emotions from the actors. On Patrick Tresset's website, he states "The model feels observed, scrutinized, which for some is uncanny as they do not expect to feel like this in front of the robots, as they feel that something is really observing and evaluating them." This is extremely intriguing because during my visit, my significant other had her picture drawn and felt like she was constantly being watched and gave her and eerie feeling. While for me, I was fairly indifferent because I was not focused on the robots and allowed myself to daydream.

   



    I think this kind of technology is fascinating and I believe evolutions of this design can be used in different practical scenarios. With the concept of using a camera and a pen, who is to say that in the future, there won't be robots in a courtroom instead of stenographers. There's the possibility of using the technology of a camera and an arm to replace baggers at grocery stores. As artificial intelligence advices, it will grant humans a large variety of convivences but at the same time, could potentially remove potential jobs and opportunities. With AI's, there are no emotions attached and different physical limitations. I've worked as a greeter at AMC where I've stood for 10 hours but needed multiple breaks in-between, but a robot with a camera and arm could do exactly what I did but for days on end without real maintenance or care. With this kind of technology being created and advanced, robots and AIs will understand how humans work and interact and can be programmed to do what humans do. 


References

https://patricktresset.com/new/project/5-rnp/

https://researchsystem.canberra.edu.au/ws/files/33747097/ALTHRI_2020_v3_CameraReady.pdf

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java Refresher

 This week I decided to give myself a refresher on Java since I haven't studied it heavily in a few months. I'm currently going through Java 11 For Complete Beginners by John Purcell on Udemy. So far in his lesson plan, he has talked about how Java compiles the code so that it can be used from computer to computer with no real issue. John has also ran through the very basics of how to print out different things.     System.out.println("Hello world!");  That's the famous first line of code that every beginner to coding learns. Although it may be slightly different depending on language, the concept is the same. The course is also teaching the fundamentals of code like creating integers and variables to be used throughout the code. They can incorporated into different kinds of arithmetic depending on my needs.      int cats = 7;     int dogs = 5;     int total = cats + dogs;     System.out.println(total);  This small bl...
Read more

Rising of OLED

Image
      Unfortunately, I have been stumped on the direction I want to take my application after seeing similar ones fail, but I've been on a huge technology kick just researching a lot about new products that are coming out and how they are changing the future of how we experience things. The most recent thing I've been researching is OLED screens. Nowadays, OLED has become a staple in almost every single field that involves a screen of some sort. Nintendo just recently released their OLED Nintendo Switch. Samsung's latest phones have all included an OLED screen to complete with Apple's Liquid Retina Pro Displays. Even TVs are adopting OLED and evolving it from OLED to QD OLED.            According to an article by Hong Jae Shin and co., OLED stands for organic light-emitting diodes. This means that each diode or pixel on a screen emits its own light. This differs from regular LED or even mini LED because they require backlight to showcase...
Read more

Random Class in Java

Image
    This week I wanted to keep improving my Java skills. I continued my Udemy course by John Purcell and watched his lecture on utilizing random class on Java. In his lesson, he utilized the the random class by creating Hangman in Eclipse but I wanted to try and use the random class with my own code from scratch. I figured the best way to learn the random class and to keep it simple would be to create a dice via Java.      It is a fairly simple project but it let me try something new and let me experiment with the random class and importing different items in Java. I had to begin the code by telling Java that I want the object DiceRoll to be Random after that I needed to initialize x, which could be labeled anything, and to have it be within the range of 1 to 6. If I were to change the line int x = DiceRoll.nextInt(6) + 1; <-- to int x = DiceRoll.nextInt(10) + 5 It would make the dice roll start at 5 instead of 1 and make the dice roll any number from 5 to 15...
Read more