A brief history of video games

I come from a family who love video games.  My Mom and Aunt used to play Tetris til early morning, and when they played, we could not get them to budge!  My siblings and I had our fill of Game n' Watches, Atari's Pong, Super Famicom, Super Nintendo, PacMan, Battle City, Galaga, Space Invaders, Phoenix (my faviourite arcade game), then on to PlayStations and the Final Fantasy series.

So understandably, this video is quite a trip down to memory lane for me (and of course it's educational too!)

Kirobo: the robot of hope

Since we’re on the topic of robots, there is something that captured my interest with the more recent supplies transport to the International Space Station (ISS). The Japanese cargo ship includes a robot which will be the companion of the only Japanese astronaut (Koichi Wakata) in the ISS come November (the robot is flying a couple of months in advance).

The cargo ship left earth last Saturday 3rd August, and is expected to dock on the 9th.

While the robot (named Kirobo) is only 13 inches high and weighs around 1 kg, this small wonder will be the focus of research and development in human-robot interaction. Kirobo derived its name from a combination of two words: ‘Kibo’, which means ‘hope’ in Japanese, and ‘robot’.

Interestingly enough, Kirobo’s design takes inspiration from Astro Boy, a popular anime series set in a future where robots have advanced intelligence and are able to coexist (sort of) with humans. The main character is a robot boy with the same name as the anime’s title, and series chronicles his adventures and experiences.  It was a very popular series (and Astro Boy is a very familiar face); I remember watching this anime when I was a kid.

Kirobo naturally speaks Japanese and has voice and speech recognition, natural language processing, speech synthesis, and face recognition. The robot is also designed to adapt to ‘living’ in gravity-absent space, ensuring that the robot knows how to move about and talk in this weightless environment. Kirobo will also assist Mr Wakata with experiments to be conducted in space.

Incidentally, the robot has a twin. Mirata will stay here on Earth and monitor the progress of Kirobo and help out with problems or malfunctions, if any.

While Kirobo is a joint project by a number of companies, the fact that Toyota Motors is one of them was a surprise to me. Until now, I have always thought Honda to be at the forefront of robotics, with Asimo as its prime project. It’s great to learn that other companies are advancing research and development in robotics and Artificial Intelligence too.

I, for one, will be among the interested parties here in earth to keep track of how Kirobo will fare. This is definitely history in the making!

For further information, visit the Kirobo Project at kibo-robo.jp/en/.

Kirobo fans can also follow his exploits on Twitter at @Kibo_robo.  The tweets are predominantly in Japanese though, but it's interspersed with photos and links so it's still worth following.

Making a Life-Size Wall-E Robot

If I had the resources (time, money, geeky knowledge for this sort of stuff), I would certainly be making my own droids as well! But I have no time, money, nor the geeky knowledge, so I will content myself with this video of how Mike McMaster's Workshop recreated Wall-E from the hit CGI movie of the same name. Awesome work.

Description for this video:
"The beloved Wall-E robot was just computer generated graphics in the Pixar movie, but fans have spent years trying to bring him to life. We visit Mike McMaster's workshop to see his incredible life-size Wall-E, a remote controlled robot that lives among an R2-D2 droid and other pets on Mike's orange farm."

Get your colours right via Pictaculous

Whenever I get asked to do a website, the first thing I always ask first is their logo. The reason I do this is because the logo can give me an idea of the color scheme for the site, and sometimes even the layout. You need to match the website with the overall branding, for which the logo (and the typeface used) encompasses this.

Getting the colour right can sometimes be a major hurdle though.  I have been using colour wheels before, but I have just recently found this online service which makes choosing the right colours even easier.