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Fembot OriHime Dances For You Video
OriHime is a beautiful fembot, or female humanoid robot, created by Kentaro Yoshifuji, a 4-year Engineering student at Waseda University. OriHime stands about two feet tall and had 24 degrees of freedom.
(Fembot Orihime video)
Design-wise he says he had no knowledge of humanoid robots, and didn’t take much interest in science fiction stories growing up. Everything except the servo motors had to be built from scratch through trial and error. Its face was kept simple on purpose, with eyes based on a feline. Rather than showing emotion through the face, which he admits looks a bit scary, the robot’s whole body conveys the operator’s mood. As a result, even a blank face begins to take on a certain character. He studied dancers and mimes at a festival and tried to incorporate the feeling of their movements into the robot.
SF writers have long warned about attachments to fembots. Consider the case of the mechanical bride, from Fritz Lieber's 1954 eponymous story:
Streamlined, smooth-working, absolutely noiseless, breath-takingly realistic. Each one is powered by thirty-seven midget electric motors, all completely noiseless, and is controlled by instructions, recorded on magnetic tape... The de luxe model is built to your specifications, has fifty different facial expressions...
(Read more about the mechanical bride)
Several decades earlier, sf great Lester del Rey described a beautiful fembot called Helen O'Loy:
The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic and rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair...
(Read more about del Rey's Helen O'Loy)
Via Plastic Pals.
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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