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Researchers Discover Emotions Surpass Technical Limitations of Instant Messages
Posted by Jack Loftus at 12:00 AM on October 27, 2008
Now there's officially no reason to leave the house. Ever. We can call in food, clothing and gadget deliveries. We can pay our bills online. Thanks to infomercials, we can exercise in the comfort of a door frame. And today we discover that we can get all randy (or depressed) chatting with significant others on IM or its cousin, the text message. So says Jeffrey Hancock and his team at Cornell University anyway, and who are we to argue with scientists?
Dave McGoran of the University of West England has built what he called the Heart Robot, a semihumanoid doll that "appreciates" affection. Covered in a variety of sensors, Heart Robot responds to your attentions with a range of expressive and, to be honest, unsettling tools: batting eyelids, a beating heart and pleasant purring, to name a few.
The FuChat concept phone is pretty, and kind of half-phone, half-Chumby as its surface is a concealed display used to show widgets: from weather displays, to showing a "keep out" sign on your door. But the emotional-sensing aspect got me intrigued. FuChat would be able to analyse your voice and body temp and guess at your emotional status... then display it back to you, supposedly enhancing the emotional aspects of communication. That sounds appealing, until you wonder what it'd be like to have a damn phone telling you you're bloody angry in the middle of an empassioned rant to the ex. As well as being designed to hang on door handles or stand on desks, this thing would have to be "smashed onto the floor-proof" too. Just a concept. [
European researchers are developing a software that will give robots the power to learn when a person is sad, happy or angry. The Feelix Growing project is putting together simple robots that can detect different parameters--facial expressions, voice and proximity--to determine emotional states. The aim of the project is to develop a robot that can serve humans with special needs, such as the ill and the elderly. Using adaptable neural networks, the robot can learn the correct way to respond to people's emotions from experience.
Roboticist Steve Yohanan thinks there's something missing from the design of 
She may look miles away from crossing uncanny valley, but Nexi from MIT's Personal Robots Group is at least on the way. She's designed to be a "Mobile Social Dextrous" machine that moves like we do when we express emotions. So, she's got fully articulated arms and a head with features that can be motored around to form expressions. Acting out emotions, she's actually rather amazing, in a slightly sad robot kinda way: the video may send a few chills down your spine, no matter how "artificial" Nexi looks now.
Exmocare's released 
