Latest Geminoid Is Incredibly Realistic

“Okay, I admit it… I found myself wondering whether this was in fact a real robot, or actually a person pretending to be a robot or even a fake robot.
It’s not a fake. This is the latest iteration of Geminoid series of ultra-realistic androids, from Kokoro and Hiroshi Ishiguro. Specifically, this is Geminoid DK, which was constructed to look exactly like Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark.

When we wrote Prof. Scharfe inquiring about the android, he confirmed: “No, it is not a hoax,” adding that they’ve been working on the project for about a year now. His Geminoid was built by Kokoro in Tokyo and is now at Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Nara for setup and testing. “In a couple of weeks I will go back to Japan to participate in the experiments,” he says. “After that, the robot is shipped to Denmark to inhabit a newly designed lab.”

If you’re wondering why on Earth someone would want an exact robotic double of themselves, besides being TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY AWESOME, the Geminoid is going to be used for researching “emotional affordances” in human-robot interaction, the novel notion of “blended presence,” as well as cultural differences (from different continents) in the perception of robots.”

Read more at ieee Spectrum