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Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
First, it was Paris Hilton and now, Barack Obama. Eric Spiegelman noticed that when President Obama hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he held the exact same smile in every photograph:
Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.
On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr (link below). And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.
There can only be on explanation: it was the Obamabot stand-in. The real President Obama was probably too busy dealing with the Russian Dead Hand in an underground bunker to be bothered by this museum stuff!
Nearly two years after it was introduced to the world, Osaka University’s CB2 robot (which stands for "Child-robot with Biomimetic Body") has been developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, just like a human baby would:
Below the soft silicon skin of one of Japan’s most sophisticated robots, processors record and evaluate information. The 130-cm (four-foot, four-inch) humanoid is designed to learn just like a human infant.
"Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more," said Osaka University professor Minoru Asada, as his team’s 33 kilogram (73 pound) invention kept its eyes glued to him.
The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and "clusters" them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.
Link – via Pink Tentacle
