At this point, society has had over three decades to get used to the Blue Man Group. Maybe that’s why we’re less disturbed by [Graham Jessup]’s face-tracking Watchman than we should be. Either that, or it’s because it reminds us of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Frankly, this is just way too cool to be dismissed out of hand as creepy.
The Watchman finds faces via video feed from a camera module positioned in his forehead as a third eye. The camera is connected to a Pi Zero that’s wearing a Google AIY vision bonnet. The Pi translates the face locations into servo positions and feeds them to an Arduino UNO located in the frontal lobe region to move the eyeballs and lids accordingly.
[Graham] had a bit of trouble with tracking accuracy at first, so he temporarily replaced the pupils with 5 mW lasers and calibrated them by tracking a printed stand-in of his head to avoid burning out his retinas.
This project builds on previous work by [Tjahzi] and the animatronic eye movements of [Will Cogley]. We can only imagine how awesome the Watchman would look with a pair of [Will]’s incredibly realistic eyeballs. Either way, we would totally trust the Watchman to defend our modest supply of toilet paper in the coming weeks. Check out a brief demo after the break, and a whole lot more clips on [Graham]’s site.
Via reddit
Sony launching the first salvo of lawyers in 5..4..3..
That may be the creepiest bit of code and hardware I’ve ever seen.
5mW lasers?
Either it’s too high for alignment or too low for retina removal…
boing boom tschak
music non stop
Florian, is that you?!
Want video of the lasers working on a moving Target, please!
Neat, but not gaudy. If you put optical corner cubes in the socket it will always perfectly track everyone in the room at the same time. And with no moving parts.
Hows that? You’re talking about retro reflector cube corner mirrors, right? All those do is return incoming light along a parallel path to its entrance angle. You cant place something in a cube corner mirror and magically look directly at all the things….. Like, it sounds like you’re comfusing the ‘following eyes’ painting/sculpting technique and the retroreflective effect of corner mirrors, and assuming that allows one optical plane to track things with out moving because from your optical plane moving past those systems it APPEARS to ‘track’ you. Remove your experience from the equation, and you should see how that all falls apart. Thats not how optics work, thats not how any optics work. (Sidenote, in case it clears up some confusion about thinking about the inner machinations of the universe: observation is not an observer and does not require sentience or life at all on any level. “Observation” is meant to imply interaction, an entangled particle can impact an air molecule and we would say the molecule has observed the quantum state and collapsed the wave function (which by the way, only reveals to you which of the entangled pair hit that air molecule, thus inferring the state of the other entangled pair. What HAS NOT happened is a particle was dancing around willy nilly and ‘decided’ which one to be. The uncertainty of the particle State exists only in the math that particle at that point in space IS one or the other you just can’t figure out which, with all your fancy formulas and weak interaction measurement techniques, all useless and the chance of which one it is will remain 50%, until you observe/interact/-with/measure it and discover which one it is. It did not decide, you just discovered. There is a difference!!!). Want to prove me wrong? Fine, build it. And I dont mean a little metal paddle vibrating with microwave energy. I mean stuff your imagined experiments, and physically prove it. Otherwise go back to your physics armchair, because opining as if one has pondered all possible aspects yet regurgitating tired old scifi tropes IS NOT HELPING EXPAND OUR UNDERSTANDING!).