Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Via slashdot, I learn that a couple of colleagues of mine have achieved nerd fame with an art project in which a robot acts out dreams.

"Is there video?" you ask. Silly reader! Of course there's video!

The deal here is that one of the two, Fernando Orellana, went to a sleep disorder center and spent a night hooked up to machines that tracked his eye motions and EEG. Then they mapped patterns in the data to specific robot actions, so an eye movemet up and to the left became a lift and turn of the robot's head, for example. Then they play the whole thing back through the robot.

It should be stressed that this is art, not science-- the mapping of brain patterns to actions is pretty arbitrary, so it's not like this is really telling us anything about what goes on in dreams. As Science Art goes, though, it's pretty cool.

Tags

More like this

There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five.