KEIHANNA, JAPAN — With little more than a train station and a few government buildings, the sleepy town of Keihanna is a far cry from the dazzling celluloid cityscapes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But just as in those classics of science fiction, futuristic robots are coming to life here -- androids that are astonishingly realistic, and could challenge our ideas of what we consider human.
Hiroshi Ishiguro is at the forefront of designing machines that look just like us. The senior researcher at Keihanna's ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories drew headlines around the world last year when he unveiled a robot that, from a few feet away, could easily have been mistaken for a Japanese woman.
Equipped with off-board cameras, microphones and floor sensors, Repliee Q1Expo can detect human presence and interview people with a microphone, moving its upper body in a smooth, natural fashion. All of which makes perfect sense, since Repliee is an android copy of Ayako Fujii, a real newscaster.
Yet Dr. Ishiguro, a fan of Star Trek's android Data, wasn't content with his Pygmalion creation. Repliee was designed as a research tool for what he terms "android science" -- a mixture of robotics and cognitive science in which androids can be used to study human behaviour such as gaze-direction.
Last June, Dr. Ishiguro's assistants pulled back a curtain before a handful of journalists to reveal an android that looked exactly like him, down to his oversized glasses and penchant for black clothing. It was sitting casually in a chair, one foot bobbing away, its eyes blinking and shoulders fidgeting in utterly human fashion. It slowly looked around the room before introducing itself in very polite Japanese.
Dr. Ishiguro's robot twin is called Geminoid, and it's not just a jaw-dropping gimmick with lifelike twitches. "The idea is tele-interaction," its creator says. "If I access the android through the Internet, I do not need to go to ATR any more."
Geminoid is actually an extremely sophisticated puppet. Dr. Ishiguro can remote-control it Wizard of Oz-style using a motion-capture system that transmits his upper-body and lip movements to 46 air actuators.
Dr. Ishiguro hit upon the idea of creating an android double in part because he got tired of commuting to Keihanna from his home in Osaka, an hour's drive away. With his main teaching job at Osaka University, he thought he could deal with his students at ATR by having a robot proxy there.
He believes that this form of communication is better than teleconferencing because the android will be able to project his physical presence, not just his image and voice. Certainly, when I sat down beside Geminoid for a chat with Dr. Ishiguro, I felt compelled to look it in the eyes, and couldn't just stare off into space as I might when talking on the phone.
So could Geminoid be a prototype for rent-a-bots that would allow distant colleagues to be telepresent and embodied at conferences? The Japanese would probably welcome the innovation. Androids are at the cutting edge of the culture's love affair with robots. Instead of fearing humanoid machines as potential Terminators, the Japanese are eagerly anticipating peaceful co-existence with them.
This lack of robo-phobia was plain at last year's Aichi Expo, a futuristic tech show where millions of Japanese lined up to chat with and get directions from multilingual android receptionists called Actroids.
A recent Japanese film, Hinokio, took up the theme of people empathizing with and acting through androids. In it, a boy who has become a shut-in because of an injury and the loss of his mother sends a humanoid robot to school in his stead, remotely interacting with classmates. The machine helps him return to society.
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