dick vitale & the robot

currently watching UT versus bamalama on ESPN and they are really playing up that tomorry night they will have announcer switch - the guys who usually work the college game will work the professional game and vicey-versey. this means dick vitale will be working the spurs game. sorry, elvis. sucks to be a spurs fan tomorry. bwah!

the latest issue of popular mechanics had some truly excellent material including an indepth article on social robots. one of the main robot people is dr cynthia breazeal at MIT. in the MIT personal robots group they're building small social robots and the one that appears to be the main focus right now is called nexi. nexi is a smallish humanoid robot with an expressive face and a penchant for looking into peoples' eyes. dr breazeal was interviewed extensively for the popular mechanics article and had her picture taken, too, and then she was also interviewed for CBS sunday morning. that was sort of weird because i just read about her and then there she was on the teevee. she's really quite attractive and looked great in the popular mechanics picture in black sweater & skirt with black tights and flats and a nice scarf as an accent. interestingly enough, this was the exact same thing that she was wearing on CBS sunday morning. do you think that she did all her interviews in one day or that she wears the same thing every day?

here's nexi. cute, huh? there is the slightly disconcerting issue of her not having any skin on her bod. i wonder if that is b/c she is still under development and dr breazeal et al need to keep an eye on her operational parts or perhaps it's so we don't mistake her for a human. heh. also notice the cyclops eye. yeah, what i am guessing there is that the good dr breazeal et al have not contrived a way to have li'l nexi look out both her eye sockets and formulate a logical combination of the two images. nexi looks at you out of her cyclops eye. what our brains do with two images is kind of amazing and i am quite certain extremely challenging to mimic. i don't think that's something the folks at MIT are focusing on. [focusing... heh.] anyway she's cute enough but from all accounts is currently sort of a glorified furby. eyesight aside, we are a far cry from C-3PO.