Japanese engineers have unveiled an eerily human-like robot that possesses qualities so realistic, it’s creepy.
“Alter,” the singing and breathing android, has taken the media by storm this week with a video of the machine making “creepily eery movements.”
So you’re probably wondering: What makes this bot different than any of the other strange-looking robots we’ve seen this year?
Alter has a neural network that breathes life into its muscles, allowing it to react to outside stimuli such as temperature, proximity and humidity. In other words, it can mimic human behavior patterns and it makes its own decisions such as when to move and when to sing.
Humans don’t have the capability to change the bot’s levels of responsiveness -- that’s up to Alter and how its sensors respond to the environment. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
If that’s not creepy enough, here’s something that may give you goosebumps: the country expects to have its own robot Olympics in just a few years.
