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The iCat: Artificial Friskiness? |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Smart Design
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Friday, 27 July 2007 |
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The stalwart and doughty researchers over at Philips have been working on an interesting project for a few years now. It's called the iCat, and though it looks similar to the menagerie of virtual pets that have come and gone, it's actually a refreshingly practical research endeavor.
 The iCat is not a consumer product -- nor is it a cat, I feel obliged
to mention. Rather it is a research platform for studying Very Deep
Questions about human-robot interaction. The 38-cm tall robotic kitty
can "see" via a camera in the head, "hear" with various microphones on
the body, and "feel" with an array of touch sensors. But it's not a
passive recording device. The cameras, for instance, work with object-
and face-recognition software so that iCat can readily discern what
it's looking at. Speech recognition means iCat can understand you
better than a regular tabby, and the advanced social intelligence AI
lets iCat interact in a variety of ways -- it can play games, or even
help you program a VCR.
This cat talks back, too. Sort of. Thirteen servos control different
parts of the face, such as the eyelids, eyebrows, mouth and head
position. Thus, the iCat can generate many different facial expressions
- happy, sad, surprised, what have you.
None of these technologies is particularly new, of course -- we've been
attempting voice recognition since well before the original Star Trek.
The iCat is part of Philips' Open Platform for Personal Robotics (OPPR)
software development initiative, which aims to allow third parties to
plug in and think about how we interact with our machines. So any
software engineer with a particular UI task can run their gadget
program through iCat and, ideally, start thinking outside the (litter?)
box.
Make no mistake, our interface habits circa 2007 -- pushing buttons,
turning dials, scrolling mouse wheels -- are going to look hopelessly
primitive to future generations. Even the iPhone, with its
feather-light touch-screen UI, is sure to be supplanted in years to
come. Someday, in the grand and glorious future, we will no longer have
machines that beep at us, or flash ERROR messages, when we do something
wrong. Instead, we can speak to them directly, and they can look back
at us quizzically. Just like real cats, now that I think of it.
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