The New Year's parties are fast approaching, and Roboxotica, the cocktail robotics festival has all of your robot bartenders lined up and ready.
Regular readers have already encountered BaR2D2 and The Miraculous Stigmatabot, which I've covered in previous articles. But feast your eyes on these robots from Roboxotica 2009, which took place in Vienna, Austria, Drinkomathalle, Missindorfstraße 21, 1140 Wien.
(Bartris is Tetris while drinking. You hope.)
Created by: Kyle Machulis
It creates a drink for the user based on their performance in a game of tetris. As each line is formed, the program keeps track of the color makeup of the line. At the end of each level, the amount of colors summed through the level are used to decide how much of each ingredient of the drink to use. The color of each piece relates to an ingredient of the drink. In this case, gray is rum, and brown is coke. In order to put some challenge into the game, the blue pieces represent water. To mix a good drink, a player will want the right balance of rum and coke, with as little water as possible, forcing the player to throw pieces away at some point, or else deal with a bad drink
Concerned citizens who want to know if there is any upside to global warming should check out Project Moscow Mule, in which bystanders are urged to reduce glacial melt flooding by grabbing a straw and lending a hand.
Created by: Daniela Böhm, Michael Fasching, Anna Hilber, Magdalena Kahr, Julia Machan, Lukas Meisterhofer, Angelika Simbeni, Gianna Catherine Tatzel, Silvia Vollnhofer, Marlene Wolfmair.
The glacier is melting and the world is being drowned in a mix of vodka, ginger ale and lime juice. Only you can rescue the last remaining part of the world by participating. Take a straw and tap the stream!
Science fiction writers loved the idea of the robot bartender; one of my favorites was from The Stars My Destination, the jaw-dropping 1956 classic by Alfred Bester.
He knew his life was at bay, faced with the decision of his life. He ignored his enemies and examined the perpetual beam carved in the robot face of the bartender, the classic Irish grin.
"Thank you," Foyle said.
"My pleasure, sir," the robot replied and awaited his next cue.
"Nice day," Foyle remarked.
"Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot responded...
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