Sadly the semester is over and it’s time for The Yume Project to disband.
Did we have fun? Hecks yeah.
Did we learn a lot? Oh mama, did we ever.
Our time with Yume was an once-in-a-lifetime experience. We can only hope an intrepid young group of ETC students will pick up where we left off next semester.
We hope you’ve enjoyed watching our progress this semester, dear readers. Be sure to check out the ETC for more awesome project goodness next semester!
See you around,
The Yume Project
Take a look at how far Yume’s come this semester!
Sorry about the flicker, we used dimmed LED lights for our pretty lighting. As you may know, LEDs can only look dimmer by flashing very quickly. Your eye can’t see it, but the camera doesn’t lie.
Earlier this semester, The Yume Project submitted a paper to the 3rd International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships at Liden University, the Netherlands.
Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been accepted! While we scurry furiously to finish our paper, you can read more about the conference here:HRPR
See you there in June!
In the struggle between believability and realism, face detection has proven quite a challenge for The Yume Project. It’s not that we can’t make face detection work, that’s the easy part! Just take a look at this:
What are you seeing? We have a webcam mounted above Yume’s head. It takes a picture, finds faces, picks one at random, and instructs the robot to look at one. Applying the animation principle of anticipation, Yume’s eyes turn followed by her head.
So technically, the system runs in a realistic manor. Unfortunately, with limited time left this semester, we aren’t going to be able to do the tweaking required to move from realistic experiment to believable interaction. We’re thrilled to have a proof-of-concept, but sad we can’t call the system ready to use.
Ideally, animation would be overlaid with face detection to make Yume appear to glance at the audience throughout her stories. Sigh…another day, perhaps.
This past weekend we took Yume to the Carnegie Science Center to show our work to the public. Here are some pictures from the event:
Turns out, robots aren’t easy to move. Setting up took about 4 hours.
Young children used to hide behind furniture in Yume’s presence.
An average crowd size from the weekend. Folks were intrigued!
How did the event go? We saw great numbers, a lot of good questions were asked by young and old alike, and we even had people return multiple days.
Check out some of the comments we collected:
“I would use her to help me be a singer she could sing Backup”
“I wish she could do my homework and go to school for me”
“I hope she won’t feel lonely at night”
Genie and Yume
“I never was so interested in Robots until I saw her.”
We were all touched, especially by that last one. Practically speaking, our design decisions have clearly brought Yume a long way from being creepy or just a curiosity. And inspiring the youth? That’s powerful stuff.
Here is a peak inside our final Maya animation interface:
Facial sliders can produce wry looks.
Final never is, of course. Our fearless programmer Yan will tell you there is still much that can be improved, this is a proof of concept. Imperfections notwithstanding, we feel this new system is a great improvement over the original animation interface:
Wait, what’s going on? I think she blinked.
We now have an animation system for Yume that does not require you to be standing in front of the robot. It works within a framework animators are familiar with. Maya also has a lot of nice features Actroid animators have not had access to before such as key framing, lip synch, and the ability to overlay motion clips to reuse animations. Here’s to great new Actroid content!
Woah, who’s that? I…I can’t take my eyes off of her…so charming, so alluring…some dark magic draws me ever closer…
That’s not magic, dear reader, it’s good design. Here we see Yume’s final costume. It is the culmination of what we learned in our costume and makeup tests and the character we designed for Yume.
You’ll notice several hold overs from our costume post, including covered hands, long sleeves, and a skirt. We did loose the V-neck because of flapping skin, but we also picked up some unexpected benefits. Audience members had pointed out that Yume’s mouth never quite closes. The addition of dark lipstick did a nice job of concealing that fact. Yume’s gauntlets also have long strings that trail from them, earning us some pleasing free animation whenever her arms move.
What kind of character is this? Slightly goth, slightly punk, all about getting your attention from across the room. She’s smart, witty, and enchanted with humans. Yes, she does know she’s a robot. She’s fairly comfortable with that fact, but can be embarrassed when her robot-ness gets in the way.
This is all new territory for the Actroid. Kokoro has never focused on the character of their creations. We feel a strong character can help clarify the robot’s purpose and help audiences better identify with something that has the potential to be very creepy.
What do you think? Is she more appealing than she was way back in January?
Good lord! What’s this? Something from Silence of the Lambs?
No, no, dear reader. What we see here before us is a makeup test. Yume’s skin is silicon based, so we have to make sure whatever makeup we use doesn’t stain or bond to her face. You are looking at a piece of extra arm skin (don’t you wish you had one of those?) sent to us for testing from Kokoro. Why such bright colors? I’m glad we’ve sparked your curiosity…
We’ve experimented with several different costume pieces in this project. Each is designed to either hide or enhance a specific aspect of Yume’s physique. Let the fashion show begin!
On the left is our earliest outfit. Yume’s hands are often pointed to as a problem, so we moved to hide them as quickly as we could. Long sleeves help, and as you can see it’s a choice we stuck with. The way the robot shifts its weight also bugs audiences. As you can see we experimented with different styles of dresses. Ultimately, a skirt gave us the best balance of hiding unnaturalness while adding some nice cloth motion.
A V-neck is nice as well, but ultimately wasn’t practical. Yume’s whole body is not covered in skin, but the V-neck does a nice job of suggesting a complete body under all that fabric. Unfortunately, when the robot turns its head it tends to pull its skin out of its clothes, which is especially disturbing. So no more plunging neckline.
How does our final costume look? Stay tuned…
