Last year, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a roboticist at Osaka University who’s built android copies of himself and 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.
Erico Guizzo is the digital product manager at IEEE Spectrum. He oversees the operation, integration, and new feature development for all digital properties and platforms, including the Spectrum website, newsletters, CMS, editorial workflow systems, and analytics and AI tools. He’s the cofounder of the IEEE Robots Guide, an award-winning interactive site about robotics. An IEEE Member, he is an electrical engineer by training and has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.