“Study for Lit from Within,” an art installation by Ryan Wolfe, consists of a bunch of living plants (common horsetail) situated in a dark room. LED lights have been surgically embedded inside the plants, and when they’re turned on, the plants are able to photosynthesize the LED light, keeping themselves alive. Each plant has been programmed to brighten and dim to its own internal sun cycle. All together, the field of plants is supposed to “remind us how modern advances increasingly reconfigure lives while offering an imaginative glimpse of the future of this intertwining.” Er, yeah… They’re cyborg plants, man. No need to try and hype it up any more than that.

You can catch these cybernetic organisms at the Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn up until June 29th.

[ Ryan Wolfe ] VIA [ Cool Hunting ]

Vibrobots are pretty squirrelly little guys, easy to make by yourself and fun to watch. BrushBots are a sort of super-sized vibrobot, with multiple toothbrush “legs.” Stick them in a paper floor arena with some drops of paint, and watch them create a piece of artwork for you:

[Direct Link]

Designed by Christian Cerrito, BrushBots are simple, cheap, and do a much better job with abstract painting than I ever could. The paths they make aren’t purely random; as the bots cross over the drops of paint, the viscosity causes them to slow down and change direction, helping the piece evolve. Not bad for a hacked up toothbrush and a pager motor, I’d say.

[ Brush Bots ] VIA [ Cool Hunting ]

He may not be doing the job he was designed for down in Los Angeles, but this (lifesize?) animatronic Wall-E robot is wandering around anyway, doing what he does best: being cute and charming. Take a look:

[Direct Link to Vid]

Apparently, these Wall-Es are being purpose-built for Disney parks, and there will be one of them on each coast (Disneyland and Disney World). They’re rumored to be showing up before the release of the movie. Too bad we consumers get stuck with the Ultimate Wall-E and not one of these awesome bots.

VIA [ io9 ]

It’s not too often (yet) that a group of humans takes orders from a robot. But if we’re going to obey one, it may as well be one developed and owned by a major corporation. Last night, Honda’s ASIMO directed the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of “Impossible Dream,” and it managed not to kill anyone or fall over:

Don’t get too excited, though… Although there’s no specific information, I’m reasonably certain that ASIMO isn’t doing anything dynamically. The routine doesn’t look completely preprogrammed, but you can bet that there are a whole heap of people backstage pushing buttons. The performance was to open a fundraiser concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma, and Honda donated over $1 million to set up a music education fund for Detroit public schools. See? Robot are our friends. Just don’t play a wrong note, or ASIMO will kick you in the nuts.

[ Press Release ]

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine commented that Eve, Wall-E’s girlfriend, looked kinda like an iPod. I didn’t agree, not so much because I couldn’t see the resemblance, but mostly because I didn’t want to admit that Apple may have some subtle influence over the design of a major character in a Pixar movie. Turns out I was dead wrong, and Apple’s influence over Eve wasn’t even particularly subtle, reports Fortune Magazine. Here are some excerpts from the article:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”

A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

I’m honestly not sure whether this should matter at all, but it kinda does, to me anyway. It’s not exactly product placement, but at the same time, it’s a little unsettling that Pixar, to some extent, is looking to Apple to help them define what is futuristic rather than trusting what (until now?) has been a wonderful imagination and vision of their own.

[ Fortune ] VIA [ The Pixar Blog ]

Over the weekend, I stopped by RoboExoticUS, a cocktail robotics festival with Austrian origins and a thriving and mostly functional contingent here in San Francisco. Why cocktail robotics? Besides the obvious (robots + booze = awesome), RoboExotica is billed as “an index for the integration of technological achievements in everyday life, and as a means of documenting the creation of new interfaces for man-machine interaction, a priori dedicated to hedonism.” So, yeah, how about let’s just stick with the robots + booze = awesome, shall we?

The robot in the pic above is Chapek, designed by David Calkins. Chapek is generally proficient at mixing drinks (choose one of four) and insulting humans, although he has an unfortunate tendency to damage himself with (appropriately enough) screwdrivers… Needless to say, orange juice and circuit boards don’t mix.

One bot that worked all too well was El Borracho Espanol, designed by Simone Davalos. It mixed Spanish Coffee, which apparently is best served on fire, so the robot incorporates a giant flamethrower that manages to make the cup blisteringly hot without in fact raising the temperature of the beverage. Oh, and it lights people and furniture on fire too, since the flamethrower doesn’t always shut itself off.

My two favorite bots, after the jump. (Read more…)

Robert Lesser has been collecting robot toys for 30 years. The only reason he stopped collecting was because he’d “acquired all the great robots and space toys”. Looking at his collection, you can see that he’s not kidding. The collection has spent the last seven years in museums, and it’s now up for auction, meaning that if you have about $30,000 lying around, you could be the owner of the Jupiter robot (operational, with packaging) pictured above. There are 200 more pieces in the auction, all in museum quality condition, and it’s totally worth paging through the online catalog. Make sure to check out the packaging on the boxes; some of it is spectacular. I’ve posted a few of my favorites, after the jump. (Read more…)

We wrote about Festo’s Air_ray last year on OhGizmo. If you haven’t seen it, it’s totally cool, and Festo has taken the concept of sea creatures flying in air a step further with this beautiful robotic jelly. The bell of the AirJelly is filled with helium to provide lift, and lithium-ion batteries provide power to the tentacles which propel the jelly through the air:

Festo’s Aqua Jelly operates on generally the same principle, except underwater. And it’s autonomous and has LEDs! Soothing video of a few of them swimming around, after the jump. (Read more…)

After some past fiascoes (you should probably not click on that link), you’ll have to wait until after the jump to check out this t-shirt. It’s a visual metaphor that’s funny and pretty tame, unless you say it out loud. (Read more…)

This awesome t-shirt has 51 (count ‘em) silhouettes of famous robots from all over the pop cultureosphere. Go on, try and place them all. If you can, I will send you a cookie. Or I would, if I could bake. I especially liked the inclusion of the Wrong Trousers… They’re fantastic for walkies, you know. The only thing is, I’m not sure if Daleks technically qualify as robots, since I’m pretty sure they’ve got creepy little baddies in there. Even the OED says that Daleks are cyborgs, which aren’t completely artificial. Oh well, I’m just being picky, 50 robots and an alien exosuit is still plenty good enough for me.

Buy one (yes, that’s an order) in charcoal, black, or red for $25.

[ Chop Shop Store ] VIA [ SpurtBot ]