Last year, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a roboticist at Osaka University who’s built android copies of himselfand other people, shocked the world with his strangest creation yet: a creepy robotic creature called Telenoid that looked like a supersized fetus. Ishiguro envisioned the Telenoid as a device a person would teleoperate to communicate with others.
The robot received a lot of attention, but there weren’t really good videos showing how the thing operated. What we needed was an intrepid reporter willing to do a, uh, hands-on test with the bot. Now IDG has done just that and brings great footage of the Telenoid talking and squiggling under the grasp of their somewhat creeped-out correspondent.
It’s clear from the video that the Telenoid can move its head and change its facial expressions, although only slightly, but still more than I expected. So for the person holding it, it’s more than just a fancy, sperm-shaped giant telephone; whether you can feel the operator’s “presence” via the robot I don’t know, but according to the reporter who tried it, you might even want to hug it.
