Grok Robots

For Eve’s creation story we go not to The Book of Genesis, but rather Fortune. They talked with Wall-E’s director about consulting with Apple to put the future in futuristic design:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”

Grok Robot readers may recall I explored this concept in an earlier post: All About Eve: Robot Design By Steve Jobs?

Wall-E on the N on Flickr - Photo Sharing

Duncan of The Future is Awesome commented on the Eve poster post below with a link to to a gallery of BNL posters - including ones for WALL-E, M-O (above) and more. I love this artistic style of retrofuturism. Or futureretroism. Or whatever it is.

This article by Hiroko Tabuchi is a quick wrap-up of the state of robotics in Japan today, where “humans and intelligent robots routinely live side-by-side and interact socially.”

Along with info on current experiments, statistics (over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005) and history, there touch on the difference in cultural portrayal robots have had in Japan compared to the United States:

Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.

While Japan had Astro Boy in 1963, in the US we had homicidal giant robots tearing up movie screens at drive-ins across the country. So you can see why we might not want them poking in our mouths with pointy instruments just yet.

Photo by Flickr user Capitu, who also has some other good stuff from the Pixar mothership.

This comment thread at Pixar Planet has some images of WALL-E toys that will be unleashed on us soon.

If you’d rather build your own, keep your eyes on this Flickr set from the WALL-E Builder’s Group.

If you’ve got a Wii, here are some screenshots from the upcoming WALL-E videogame.

Phobot is “a phobic robot, who’s very scared of certain objects, and robots in particular.” While designed as a tool to help kids with phobias, such behavior might also be desirable in any personal companion robot who would fear joining up with any robot uprisings.

Phobot was the winner of the Human-Robot Interaction 2008 Student Design Competition.

In the latest trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E we meet EVE, object of WALL-E’s robo-love. Here’s EVE as she arrives on the scene:

EVE’s design leads to the question: was Steve Jobs wandering his old Pixar stomping grounds in Emeryville the day EVE was designed?

Pixarian: So this is EVE, and she exits the spacecraft and WALL-E
Jobs: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s up with all those buttons and dials and those things on her face?
Pixarian: Her eyes?
Jobs: Yeah those. Get rid of those and everything else. You just need the robot body and a screen.
Pixarian: No face?
Jobs: Just have some eyes glow in when you need them.
Pixarian: What about -
Jobs: No.
Pixarian: Maybe if we put -
Jobs: Wrong.

In subsequent scenes you’ll notice EVE has sub-surface indicators and lights/scanners when needed:

Of course, in the end Steve is all about compromise:

Pixarian: Then she flys around with this retro iPod.
Jobs: Brilliant.

At thirty seconds into this teaser, you’ll see Harry Houdini up against an electricty-shooting robot:

This is a preview for the Houdini the Movie Star collection. His robot foe is featured in The Master Mystery. Released in 1919 this is probably the first robot to appear in a motion picture. It was referred to as “The Automation”

Here is the final trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E. We catch glimpses of other robots and of course there is lots of running (or rolling (or flying)) around and fast cut so you can’t quite figure out everything that’s going on. But it is enough to see that WALL-E is in looooove.