I love finding things you'd never see coming -- like a robotics program at Carnegie Mellon and an Austin, TX based rock band coming together to produce, well... see for yourself:
The original video has more than 1.3 million views on YouTube already ...
The robotic creature in the video is called a Keepon, and according to the Carnegie Mellon page, "is designed to perform emotional and attention exchange with human interactants (especially, children) in the simplest and most comprehensive way."
We often see robots built as beasts of burden -- bomb sniffers, stair climbers, Honda salesmen, but how often do we see robots built primarily for such simple, basic human interaction. Without having been assembled to look like a dog, human, or other easily recognizable symbol -- we immediately can attribute human characteristics to a tennis ball/nerf blob that simply reacts to stimuli like we do. Abstract design works if you provide contextual interaction -- OR -- weird stuff makes sense if it can initiate the conversation.
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