Even with the added hardware that lamp still looks relatively normal. But its behavior is more than remarkable. The lamp interacts with people in an incredibly lifelike way. This is of course inspired by the lamp from Pixar’s Luxo Jr. short film. But there’s a little bit of most useless machine added just for fun. If you try to shut it off the lamp shade is used to flip that switch on the base back on.
[Shanshan Zhou], [Adam Ben-Dror], and [Joss Doggett] developed the little robot as a class project at the Victoria University of Wellington. It uses six servo motors driven by an Arduino to give the inanimate object the ability to move as if it’s alive. There is no light in the lamp as the bulb has been replaced by a webcam. The image is monitored using OpenCV to include face tracking as one of the behaviors. All of the animations are procedural, making use of Processing to convey movement instructions to the Arduino board.
Do not miss seeing the video embedded after the break.
[via Gizmodo]
I love lamp.
Lamp seems like an ass, which is awesome considering he’s a lamp.
Middlerun beat me to it…. damn.
The ultimate reverse of the incredibly useless machine.
LOL, I knew that last part was somehow familiar.
But lamp isn’t a lamp :( lighting fail.
Just add a not-too-bright LED and the problem is solved.
Imagine having the light voice activated, only for Lamp to turn it off at will, hahahah.
I want one of those soo badly.
Even better, it can flash it’s light at you if you upset it, or to get your attention.
Hell, why not throw in a RGB LED?
Either way, I want one enough to consider trying it myself. :D
.. Or automatically turns the lights on for you when you are reading something.
This. I spent the whole video waiting for it to spot a page of text in that notepad and shine a light on it
I did some digging and it turns out there is a light on the lamp.
Build log is here http://abdesign.posterous.com/private/DjrzhnIJHz
Aww, he’s so cute.
How did you figure out that this lamp is male?
What do you think Lamp is touching there to turn itself on?
Maybe because of the switch on its base…
He’s easy to turn on, but difficult to turn off. Female lamps are the opposite.
:P
That was an excellent answer . You must be a thespian!
Once again, another potentially awesome build ruined for me by the fact that Vimeo just doesn’t work on over half the computers out there.
The download link finally worked without crashing Firefox. That project is awesome. It would be cool as others have said to put lights in the ‘head’, and maybe to run the cables through the hollow leg tubing if it’s that standard accordion light tubing.
Firefox + Linux? If so, same here. If you click on the vimeo logo of the embedded not-working player you’re redirected to the Vimeo site. If I click on the video on the Vimeo site it *does* play correctly in Firefox on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04).
Using Ubuntu (Kununbu) and FF, no problems at all.
I gave that lamp and amp. Lamps love amps.
Hahaha :D
There are some other pretty neat ideas on the same idea. I like the ideas behind the LuminAR lamp which has webcam and pico projector: http://direct.media.mit.edu/people/natan/current/luminar.html.
wow epicly funny! +1
i’d have put a light,
just so it could turn itself OFF as soon as you turn it on.
three times and it starts jumping around and hits you!
knock it out before it has a chance to turn itself off (hit it in the piezo sensor),
and it stays on until it wakes up and then turns itself off again.
so it forms a five minute timer, but only for those willing to hit it (fight back).
XD
its almost like using windows!
you hav to fight to get it to work XDXDXD
They should add a feature that it gets “sad” if you leave it alone for an extended period of time, gives up and turns it’s self off (:
I was waiting for it to do that the whole credits roll
Fantastic build, I want one!
Yet another wobbly contraption with hobby servos.
It’s almost like an inverse “Most Useless Machine” in that it always wants to turn itself on, rather than off… but does it light up?
The only thing this lamp is missing is an actual lamp.
Adorable! Now it just needs to hop and crush things like in the Pixar logo.
It would be a massive hit with the Japanese..
I love lamp.
Happy to see a New Zealand hack featured! Go us!
He’s cute. I’m talking about the guy in the video, although the lamp is cute too.
Birth of skynet.
I freaking love Processing. Is the source code available for this project?