The Face of Peace

This animation was created by Se-Hyung Park for the Korean pavilion at the World Expo in Aichi, Japan, in 2005.  The theme of the event was the wisdom of nature and this short illustrates that where nature has its adversaries (notably us!) then it can often bounce back and recover.

The animation of The Face of Peace used an amalgamation of old-style oriental painting techniques and digital methods which come together beautifully to successfully combine the sensibility of beauty found in the old Korean arts and the new media technologies of contemporary Korean information technology.  The Face of Peace contains some startling and beautiful imagery which serves both as a metaphorical history of the two Koreas as well as a meditation on the natural world.

Amazing Dance of Nao by Aldebaran Robotics (video)

You may have heard of Nao - he is the robotic creation of European company Aldebaran.  This, though, is simply brilliant.  The company, founded by Bruno Maisonnier who has had a dream for over twenty five years that robotics could become an everyday reality, is currently marketing their Nao robot like crazy - and you can see why here.

Perhaps we are one step closer with Nao, who we see here performing en masse in the French Pavillion at the Shanghai Expo, to realising the dream of robots in our lives.We may not be in the full realm of Spielbergian Artifical Intelligence but certainly a few steps closer thanks to Nao and his dancing feet.

Nao possesses four microphones which fitted into his head and a voice recognition and analysis system. You can supplement the words he already knows with words and expressions you want to add. These words can trigger any behaviour you choose. He has full bluetooth capacity and you can send him your music to play back to you later!

He can also read out any files that you store on (in?) him which can even be from an RSS flow so you can catch up with your favorite blogger (cough, cough!) through him.  He has speakers on either side of his head and he can even be configured to allow for voice alterations. Nao is also capable of detecting the source of a sound or voice to deal with that source and start interacting.

This is worth watching to the end just to see the really cute way he bows.

World Expo Opens in Shanghai

Yesterday saw the opening of the World Expo in the historic Chinese city of Shanghai. The Big Picture, which is probably the best photographic blog in the world, has an amazing array of photographs which will leave you gasping and wishing that you could get there to see it all. True, there are going to be an estimated one hundred million visitors to the event - buy 95% of those are going to be Chinese which means the rest of the world will only be sending a paltry five million.

So, if you can't make it yourself and want to see what your country and others have contributed to this mind blowing exposition, take a look at these fascinating pictures HERE.