Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University in Japan, has created an android double of himself and intends to use it to give lectures to test how well his creation recreates the ‘presence’ of genuine human interaction.
Ishiguro was recently in the news when he demonstrated a female android he had created which was a copy of a popular Japanese news reader.
One of his main aims is to understand the subtleties of face-to-face human interaction so he can reproduce this artificially and overcome the so-called ‘uncanny valley‘ that makes close-to-human robots seem synthetic and unnatural.
Link to Wired article on Ishiguro’s android double.
Mind Hacks 