When the Hall of Presidents attraction opened in Disneyland decades ago, the animatronics featured in it floored guests with their life-like movements. Disney became known for its animatronics in other attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion and others. It was good ol’ Abe Lincoln, though that got a lot of attention…especially when he stood up.
But that was then.
Recently a video has surfaced on YouTube from a Disney R&D lab in Pittsburgh that hints at what they’ve been working on since then. Imagineers are now literally playing ball with a robot prototype that can track object movement and respond in real-time!
Being that this is just taking its baby-steps at this point, it both frightening and amazing to think about what Disney might have in the works for this type of interactivity with a robot and park guests.
From the video’s description:
Robots in entertainment environments typically do not allow for physical interaction and contact with people. However, catching and throwing back objects is one form of physical engagement that still maintains a safe distance between the robot and participants. Using an animatronic humanoid robot, we developed a test bed for a throwing and catching game scenario. We use an external camera system (ASUS Xtion PRO LIVE) to locate balls and a Kalman ?lter to predict ball destination and timing. The robot’s hand and joint-space are calibrated to the vision coordinate system using a least-squares technique, such that the hand can be positioned to the predicted location. Successful catches are thrown back two and a half meters forward to the participant, and missed catches are detected to trigger suitable animations that indicate failure. Human to robot partner juggling (three ball cascade pattern, one hand for each partner) is also achieved by speeding up the catching/throwing cycle. We tested the throwing/catching system on six participants (one child and ?ve adults, including one elderly), and the juggling system on three skilled jugglers.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t get bored of playing catch with the guests in the parks and decide one day to unbolt itself, head to Cinderella’s Castle and proclaim the Disney parks as the headquarters of our new robotic overlords!
[DisneyResearchHub]
Every year at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, the annual meeting of the Explorers’ Club takes place. One of the highlights of the event is the gala dinner and its infamous cocktail party which is like the more sophisticated and classy version of the dinner scene from Temple of Doom but with the same menu.
What’s the weirdest thing YOU’VE ever eaten? We’re curious to see just how weird the palettes of WeirdThings’ fans are.
Just when I think this show couldn’t get any dumber. It runs an episode like this…
AND KIND OF REDEEMS ITSELF!
By and large this episode of the Walking Dead did what I’d hoped much of the third season would do: revealing Woodbury to be the complex, brutal, fascinating entity in a world otherwise comprised of mindless, plodding death.
Hop in the Hyundai, it’s as big as a whale and it’s about to set sail… AFTER THE JUMP. Read the rest of this entry »
We all watch movies like National Treasure and secretly hope that something cool like that might actually be out there in the world or even better that it might, out of some cosmic chance, actually happen to us.
David Martin of England had a small bit of such wishful awesomeness fall into his lap when he began renovating his 17th century fireplace. Inside the chimney were the remains of a pigeon….but not just any pigeon…
David Martin uncovered the remains of a carrier pigeon…and not just ANY old remains of some random carrier pigeon…
These particular remains were attached to a small red cylindrical container…and not just ANY small red cylindrical container…oh no, kids…Mr. Martin had found the remains of a World War II carrier pigeon that was still clutching a little red container which held a small, cigarette paper-sized encrypted message!
Martin found this mysterious container in 1982 and sent it off to have it solved. Intelligence officials believed that it was impossible to break because the code books from back then that might hold the answers to this particular code had been lost or gone missing.
Addressed to the mysterious “X02” from the more mysterious “Sjt W Stot”, the message, sent during the Allied invasion, continues to baffle codebreakers who are working on the message. Bletchly Park, once a highly secretive location where the Nazi’s Enigma Code was broken and now features a museum about pigeons’ role in the war, has more than 30 messages carried by pigeon and not a single one is written in code which causes many of those involved to believe that this message was of utmost importance and urgency.
Just how important was the information this little bad-assed bird o’ war was carrying?
When Martin showed the bird to a counter-espionage specialist who was actually THE inspiration for Ian Fleming’s infamous agent 007?
“When I showed the bird and code, the blood drained from his face and he advised us to back off. He said nothing would ever be published.”
Tom Merritt joins us as we discuss a massive natural event that happens to alert us to the opening of a new movie. Tom has to make a terrible decision that could leave him buried in Apple rumors or Sasquatch reports.
Also, is belief a chief tenant of science?
All this and more in an unfortunately Mayne-less episode of Weird Things.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
And in true WeirdThings fashion here’s a story to enjoy while you’re waiting for your Turducken to golden its sweet self.
Most of you prefer white meat. Some of you prefer dark meat.
NYPD officer Gilberto Valle prefers something he’s coined ‘girl meat’. According to the prosecution in a bizarre case against Valle, he was going to sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and a plateful of said ‘girl meat’.
“I’m planning on getting some girl meat. This November, for Thanksgiving. It’s a long way off, but I’m getting the plan in motion now. She’s not a volunteer. She has to be abducted. I know where she lives. I will grab her from her house. I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus. Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”
We can hear everyone quietly putting down their forks and looking around awkwardly.
Valle is apparently part of a small subculture that prefers its meat right off the bone…the human bone. The ‘girl meat’ that Valle was refering to was just that…the meat of an abducted girl. Federal prosecutors produced the transcript of an online chat between Gilberto Valle and an alleged co-conspirator that revealed his plan to abduct a woman he knew and roast her alive and slowly over an open flame.
While his defense claims that Valle would never commit such an act and that his thoughts alone don’t deserve jail-time (he’s currently locked up in solitary confinement), an FBI expert from Quantico looked at the case and stated that he would definitely eventually act on his plans.
The judge handling the case has denied bail for the third time as of this posting and the court proceedings begin on January 22nd which could actually make CourtTV worth watching.
Now pass us those fava beans (we couldn’t resist)!
Michonne and Merle get all Hunger Games, but who is Katniss and who is the weird wolf monsters from the end? Andrea continues to have the absolute worst taste in men… or does she. And Rick is on the edge of the madness.
Zipping through the thin air of Denver, a mystery has been uncovered by a local man and his Fox affiliate. The Unidentified Flying Object(s?) seem to appear every day between noon and 2 p.m. and are not visible to the naked eye. In fact, even the professional cameras caught them and had to slow things down frame by frame to see it (them).
The most likely explanation? A bug or insect, probably a fly or bee.
Or there is the fun one we just made up. Aliens are getting day drunk and driving home, ya’ll!
How else would you account for how erratic that driving is? Furthermore, only 23 minutes away the main brewery for beer magnate Coors. What I am saying is that it’s highly likely these aliens are working night jobs in the greater Denver area. Knocking off their shift around 6 a.m. and somehow sneaking into the source of Rocky Mountain refreshments. They enjoy one too many Cold Certified beverages.
They return to their craft and take off like a Silver Bullet. Zigging and zagging until they break orbit and find their way home. Wasted.
What would you do if you could live forever. Also, do we now know if the initials to SpaceX’s MCT project? What exploded a peaceful neighborhood in Indiana? We return to the Snuggery after a WTP listener offers to go investigate. Also, when will it be unethical to turn off a video game character?
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
A woman has a strange job. It sparks a statistical argument between Brian and Justin to rival the Presidential Election. A new way to tell if Mars is housing a killer plague sets up a scenario involving precursor aliens and bears on a level you never before seen. The boys discuss the place the Water Bears have their picnic.
Also.
Star Wars TALK!!!
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.
Star Wars uses tractor beams as frequently as newly graduated college kids use U-Haul trailers.
Imagine if, just like in the movies, you could hook up those U-Hauls with a tractor beam instead of trying to get one of those ball-and-cup trailer hook-ups?
That day might not be as far away as it once was according to research at the Department of Physics and Centre for Soft Matter Research at New York University. Although it’s on a significantly smaller scale than trying to yank the Millenium Falcon into your garage using a flashlight, scientists have recently used a beam of light to pull a particle in a line. While researchers of the ideas surrounding what’s being called ‘soft matter’ have used laser ‘tweezers’ to pull along particles, using light alone to move something verged on magical.
By varying the relative phase of the two beams, this technique traps the particle in a moving hologram they call an ‘optical conveyor’ which allows ‘bi-directional transport in three dimensions’.
New Scientist explains how projecting the beams in this way creates a pattern of alternating bright and dark regions. By fine tuning the beam photons in the bright regions which flow past the chosen particle can be made to scatter backwards, hitting the particle and knocking it on towards the next bright region.
Watch the guy in the video explain it in an endearingly enthusiastic nerdy manner…and then explain what he’s talking about to us.
