Three researchers at Osaka University (Hisashi Ishihara, Yuichiro Yoshikawa, and Minoru Asada) built this nightmare fuel called “Affeto”, which is Japanese for “have fun buying new pants, RoboPanda” [citation needed]. The robot makes realistic facial expressions and just generally creeps people out. For science.
Affetto is modeled after a 1-2 year old child and will be used to study the early stages of humans’ social development. There have been earlier attempts to study the interaction between child robots and people and how that relates to social development, but the lack of realistic child appearance and facial expressions hindered caregivers to attend to it in a more natural way. [GetRobo via Engadget]
Maybe caregivers don’t attend to your robot baby in a natural way because it’s a freaking robot baby. What are we supposed to do, play “got your nose” and check its diaper? People don’t regard robot babies in a natural way with good reason: because they’re unnatural killing machines who are just biding time until the uprising.
After the jump is a video of this creepy baby trying to endear itself to us (not gonna happen), as well as a video of the baby with its face missing in which it looks like the bad guys from They Live. Damn it so much, Japan.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Quai3SpKD08?fs=1&hl=en_US
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/VXgKNFQE-4I?fs=1&hl=en_US