God and creator
Posted: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 3:26 AM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
CES2008
OLogic definitely had the coolest display I saw while I was down there. Not very flashy, as you can see, but this is the guy who controlled the robot with his mind. See the blue thing on his head? It's reading his brain waves. The way I understood the explanation, your brain has a certain electromagnetic pattern that changes depending on your mental state. That pattern can be read by a machine. The trick, then, is to put yourself in a certain mental state on purpose and have that be a command that the robot recognizes. It made more sense when he said his wife uses the trick of doing math in her head. That occupies her brain in such a way as to put her in a certain mental state.
Here's
a local news feature on the technology.
By the way, they also had the custom wheelchairs. Not sure what that was about but they were cool too.
I'll just add here while I'm talking about robots that the
Bioloid robot kit looks like the answer to where to start if you want to build a robot. I actually picked up and almost walked away with the manual you see there next to the box. I thought it was free literature but the woman behind the table grabbed it from my hand, it comes with the kit. Inside it shows how to program the different digits in the robot you build.
And speaking of building robots, I may have mentioned
Buglabs here before but I love the idea so much I'm going to mention it again.
The idea is that you start with a basic platform and add components that do different functions until you build a device that serves a purpose you need. It's like Yahoo Pipes but for hardware. Along with building your device you go to the site and download software for it - open source so the whole community is contributing ideas.
