Last month, the Digital Look presented the humanoid robot Ameca – that one machine with a gray face capable of reproducing facial expressions incredibly realistically.
Ameca gained the media spotlight and the attention of anonymous and famous on the Internet, such as the eccentric billionaire Elon Musk, who in addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Neuralink and Tesla Motors, is also Vice President of OpenAI, a non-profit research institution in Artificial Intelligence, which aims to promote and develop user-friendly AI.
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When he came across the institutional video promoting the robot on the web, Musk reacted with a “Yikes”, equivalent expression “Damn!”, which demonstrates the businessman’s surprise.
Chrissy Teigen, an American model famous for her controversial opinions on social media, shared the video with her more than 13 million Twitter followers, saying something along the lines of “Definitely not” – using a profanity, in fact.
All the “auê” over Ameca left its creators enchanted. “We were incredibly surprised,” Morgan Roe, COO of Engineered Arts, said in an interview with Cnet. “Overnight, it became a sensation. We have 24 million views on a post on Twitter.”
Now, Ameca is in CES 2022, impressing even more people and showing that science fiction has just become real.
With its entire plastic and metal body, a genderless face, and 17 individual motors inside its head controlling its movements and expressions, the creature, in Roe’s words, is a “not-quite-robot with not-quite-human appearance.” Be that as it may, the fact is that their facial expressions are surprisingly vivid and emotional.
According to Roe, it is this combination of artificial and realistic that plays with our collective vision of what humanoid robots will look like in the future. “We’ve all seen it in the movies, we’ve all seen ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ and suddenly this is real.”
Attendance at CES 2022 marks the first time Ameca is being shown to crowds. And, by all accounts, it has caught everyone’s attention.
This isn’t the first humanoid robot Engineered Arts has released. For the past four years, the company has been creating a line of realistic robots and showing them to visitors to fairs and exhibitions like this one.
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“Each robot is designed and built from internal 3D scans of real people, allowing us to imitate human bone structure, skin texture and expressions convincingly,” says the Engineered Arts website. “The Mesmer range is designed to be modular, so you can remove the head with one click and no tools, and swap it for another one.”
At CES 2022, the Ameca robot is stationary in the Engineered Arts area, not circulating among the public. But that’s not typical stardom for an instant new internet celebrity.
It’s just that he doesn’t know how to walk. “There are many obstacles to overcome before Ameca can walk,” says the company’s website. “Walking is a difficult task for a robot, and while we’ve done research on it, we haven’t created a complete walking humanoid.” Roe says it will be at least 10 years before a robot like Ameca is “walking among us” as a service robot.
Ameca also doesn’t have a realistic skin tone or human hair like the robots in the Mesmer line. He has a translucent plastic skull, and we can see his joints and internal parts.
“What we found was that when you try to make her look ultra-realistic, [como] our other Mesmer line, looks a little more sinister,” Roe revealed. Really, if Ameca’s so reliable facial expressions are already impressive, imagine if they were made by a robot with a totally human-like appearance.
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