The selfie: pop culture’s most frivolous form of self-expression is also probably one of the most human acts you could find yourself doing in a day. Everyone is guilty of snapping a quick pic from time to time with the expectation that it will leave an impression on those who see it. All of the implications surrounding why we do this support our deep-seated need to sculpt an identity for ourselves using others as the hammer and chisel. So, consider how upside-down the world would feel if you caught a robot posing for a shot in the mirror? What about one whose sole function was to take selfies and post them? If this breaks your mind a little, that was the intention. This #selfie robot by artists [Radamés Ajna] and [Thiago Hersan] is the first development in a larger body of work called “memememe”, which is meant to comment on our culture’s obsession with the trending, selfing nature of social media. This specific project explores the relationship between conversation and identity in a situation where there is no second party.
Hardware-wise, the #selfie bot is a Stewart platform made from six servo motors and a few pieces of carefully measured pushrod connected with swivel-ball-links. An android phone is mounted on the end effector which acts functionally as the robot’s face and eyes. To make it self-aware in a sense, [Ajna] and [Hersan] created their own recognition software with Open CV using a collection of sample images of various phones as reference points. As soon as the robot recognizes itself in the mirror as indicated by specific words flashing on its screen, it takes a picture, immediately uploading it to its own tumblr account. [Ajna] and [Hersan] have a nice description of their process on the project’s Instructable’s page which you can check out to see how they used Haar Cascades to create their custom object recognition. Additionally, if you’d fancy building your own robot to covertly place in your living room to snap pictures of other phones, you could check out their code on github.
Watch it selfie :
“sole” function. Also, this is probably not true: “Everyone is guilty of snapping a quick pic from time to time with the expectation that it will leave an impression on those who see it.” Everyone is a dangerous word.
Agreed. “Everyone” is not a 3 year old tugging at their mothers shirt screaming “Mommy watch me”, while they do every boring mundane thing.
I like sarcasm!
Why haven’t they added an ‘upvote’ buton with the new theme ?
No. Upvote/any sort of voting on the popularity of comments leads to a circlejerk. Not kidding. See Federalist No. 10
@Brian: Dude, I enjoy posting a comment once in a while, I look (and do other things) elsewhere for my satisfaction. Perhaps you (too) want to leave (your?) sexuality out of it?
Being friendly with each other on a forum is not the problem I think, it is the downvotes for good but unpopular post that are the real problem, IMHO.
Ooooh… i like the new site theme :#
How dare you have your own opinion in the HaD comments!
:D so true.
First off I’m sorry to the creator of this hack, I realise this is nothing to with your hack, it’s just the first place I could express a comment. The new design is really nice, what would be even better would be the blog on the homepage. Oh and more green and black! (I really miss the green :( )
A bit risky to keep those 15000uF Caps still in there after such a blast. They might be the next that will fail.
ups, wrong Thread. New Design but no improvement of delete/editing comments… :/
LOL! Vainest of the vain. This was too great to pass up. This reminds of a recent article I had read http://www.exploretalent.com/articles/the-most-epic-selfies-of-all-time/ which shows the best of the best spic selfies ever captured.