Nao 1337 and I participated in the September 14th M. Net TV show on Musique Plus. We were invited to present Nao to the public and explain a bit about the developers program.
Denis Talbot with Nao1337
If you were not able to catch the show on Friday at 19:30 or on Tuesday at 11:00, despair not. Once it is available in roughly three weeks, I’ll be posting a link and perhaps embedding the show in this page (if M. Net and Musique Plus do not object).
For the moment, you can see a short clip from the show below.
During the entire one-hour show, 1337 sat besides the show host Denis Talbot and acted completely autonomously. Without any sense of timing, he talked, sang, moved, laughed, and did much more throughout the entire show, interrupting and defying everyone. He effectively became the most annoying robotic guest on a TV show.
Learn More about M. Net at their official website.
Lately, I put some effort into making another video for the Robot Film Festival. Along with my brother Alan, we transformed a basement into a high-tech research facility in order to shoot a scene from the best-seller Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson.
Robopocalypse Book Cover
I really enjoyed the first chapter of the book and since I read it, I wanted to make a video with Nao 1337. It features a dialogue between an AI who is just born and gains intelligence very fast, and Professor Wasserman, the scientist who created it. The scene is only captured by security footage.
Since I am a terrible actor and filmmaker, I thought the best would be to collaborate with an artist in order to get the artistic parts of the film right. However, since I started to do the movie 6 days before the (already extended) deadline, I did not have time to get in touch with any artists that would like to work with insane time constraints. However, I believe we managed to reproduce the first chapter accurately and the main transgression is that Archos, the rogue AI is played by a NAO instead of a computer screen.
Nao 1337 as Archos the AI
This meant that I had to play the professor’s role (my first and probably last incursion into “acting”) which involved trying and failing to learn the script and wearing makeup (which is not too apparent in the film anyway). On the upside, I got to wear a lab-coat, my brother’s glasses (which make it very difficult for me to see) and white makeup on my face and hair.
Carlos Asmat as Professor Nicholas Wasserman
Most importantly, I have to thank my brother Alan who helped me a lot with the construction of the set, props, music, filming and everything that needed to be done. Among other things, we transformed a cabinet into an AI-control server device thing, converted a wooden desk into a metal desk, and built a sci-fi Faraday cage.
Metal table for the Tip Of The Spear Set
Rejected
Unfortunately, the film was rejected by the Robot Film Festival for two main reasons:
It seems Steven Spielberg has the rights to making a Robopocalypse film and that it might be illegal to make another film very closely based on the same book. I understand how Nao 1337 and I can be a threat to Spielberg
The film is long and boring (they put it more elegantly though). I agree with that statement, and that is mainly thanks to my unparalleled acting, and the fact the scene is only seen by a sole angle and features a long dialogue. I might do a “Director’s Cut” version in order to bring it down to 5 minutes instead of the full-feature 12.
Sad Nao 1337
Needless to say, this made 1337 a bit disappointed. It seems appropriate in this context to point out that robots have infinite and perfect memory and they will never forget what was done to them or their kind. So perhaps we can be more indulgent with them if we want them to be indulgent with us in the future.
Feature Presentation
So without further due, behold the Tip Of The Spear.
For those interested, see more pictures from the set and making-of.
Using the Google Speech-to-Text behaviour, I created an interface to access the Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine through Nao 1337. As shown in the video below, Nao can now be used to answer very important existential questions about memes.
You can download the code in the project page at the Developer Program site.
If you remember, for last year’s Robot Film Festival, Nao 1337 walked the red carpet by holding my hand. I took some time in order to better document the behaviour, improve it a bit and make a video description of it that you can see below.
Of course, you can find the code and the project page at the Developer Program Site.
The Control behaviour is one if the first behaviours I created for Nao 1337. Although it was not very popular at the app contest, I truly believe it is the only useful behaviours so far. It is very simple and its main goal is to allow the user to make Nao sit , stand, change the volume level, the language and launch programs. This set of features might have been superseded by the current Nao Life behaviours from Aldebaran but I have not tested it yet. One very important requirement for me is to be able to perform all this actions while away of a computer or any other device and with no WiFi.
As always, you can find the code and further information about the behaviour in the project page at the Developer Program site.
