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

• Robots created from sans serif fonts
• Soviet kids’ book about robots (translated from French to Russian to English)
• Elephantine robot cleans urinals

 I’m pretty sure after you kick this thing you have to drop the pieces into either liquid nitrogen and/or molten steel to completely destroy it. 

The Stupid Robot Contest is an annual show held by Meiwa Electronics to determine whose robot is the silliest…Some of the other contestants last year were a chorus of pregnant wife robots, a child robot that did push-ups, and and a “moe” robot dressed like a maid from a maid cafe.

Here are some videos: 1, 2, 3

Videos via a report in Japanese at Robotwatch

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.

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.

Hyperdirectional wheels, carries up to 400 pounds. Announced at RoboBusiness; no news on the Segway site yet.