
Hiroshi Ishiguro: The Man Who Made a Copy of Himself - njrc
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/humanoids/hiroshi-ishiguro-the-man-who-made-a-copy-of-himself/0
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NathanKP
The most interesting part of the article in my opinion:

 _Then a boy pokes the android’s face. ”Yahh, don’t touch to my face,”
Ishiguro yells. The kids laugh. But what just happened was quite profound.
Ishiguro says that when the kid poked the robot’s face, he felt a tingle on
his cheek—even though nothing was attached to his face. For an instant,
Ishiguro’s brain mistook his body for another—in Austria. Ishiguro has
experienced this many times in different settings, all with the same result:
He feels as though the touch were real. He believes the phenomenon stems in
part from observing the synchronization of the android’s head and lips with
his own. When Ishiguro uses the Geminoid, he sees video from external cameras
that show the robot’s field of view and also its face. Because he is watching
the robot’s lips move as he speaks and seeing its head move when he turns his
own neck, Ishiguro’s brain starts to treat the robot as an extension of his
own body._

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sp332
This is an amazingly easy illusion to experience.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/note_nf6.html> and
[http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/induced_outofbody_.htm...](http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/induced_outofbody_.html)
describe three experiments you can set up yielding similar effects.

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decode
The illusions you linked to are different from the one Mr. Ishiguro describes.
In those illusions, the person is actually being touched at the same time as
seeing something being touched. In Mr. Ishiguro's case, he wasn't being
touched at all, he only saw the touch happen.

~~~
sp332
Sorry, I forgot to double-check the specific links I posted. There is another
step which they left out. I'll just describe the whole thing:

1\. Hide your hand from yourself.

2\. Have a friend tap/stroke your hidden hand and some other object that you
can see. Use a synchronized, but arrhythmic pattern. Any object will do, even
the surface of a table.

3\. After 30 seconds to 1 minute, your brain will "connect" the object to the
neural impulses. Now the friend should hit the object (but not your hand!)
really hard. Your hand will feel tingly! There is a paper I can't find right
now which documents that skin conductance actually changes, as if responding
to being hit.

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Splines
It's interesting to see how the animation/film industry has approached the
uncanny valley not by crossing it, but by avoiding it altogether. One of the
reasons I love the movie WALL-E is that Pixar has imbued WALL-E (the robot)
with so many human nuances and characteristics that you empathize with him
quite quickly, even though he looks nothing like a person.

There are very few animated television shows/films that I can think of that
attempt to depict humans with as much realism as possible. The ones that have
tried (off the top my head, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within comes to mind) still
have unconvincing depictions.

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jluxenberg
Here's a video of the robot in action. Definitely impressive but squarely in
the uncanny valley <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAO_DTeoVm8>

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pan69
This is still my favorite robot: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww>

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jrockway
I, for one, welcome our new android-porn overlords.

