A Waste of Times to Come

O.k, so exactly what is the point of this video clip, you may ask.
It would appear that someone put together a robot with the sole purpose of playing a video game.
More importantly, someone obviously invested a great deal of money and time to build a sophisticated machine with no meaningful purpose whatsoever. I mean, it’s not exactly feeding the orphans of the world, is it?

Allow me to step back in time, for a moment. Back to the dawn of the computer age. Technology emerging from behind the fortified walls of high tech, military, and industry. It started with the geeks, the high tech do-it-yourselfers that built thier own machines on the kitchen table. The troopers that soldered diodes ad nauseum, wrapped wires onto tiny fragile terminals, and singed their knuckle hair with their soldering irons. They glared at green monochrome monitors, and programmed in BASIC. There was no Internet, and no real communication link. They embraced the technology because there was something yet to come. The first computers were a novelty, but they ushered in a new generation of technology. The first users were outcast, because no one understood what they were trying to accomplish. They believed that computers had a place in the future, and had no idea as to the extent in which computers would ultimately affect all of our lives.

Personal computers first entered the mainstream market late in the 1970’s, and became more prevalent into the 80’s. Eventually we saved up our cash, and forked over $2500 for an Apple II of our own. The bright advertisements showed happy families doing the taxes together, or typing a letter to grandma. We brought them into our homes, sold on the idea of a new way of doing things. And what did we do with them?

We played games.

We sat for hours under the radioactive green glow and typed commands to navigate the fantasy world of a text adventure. We pounded on the arrow keys to control the ever growing worm, and shook our fists in fury when the worm finally devoured itself and ended the game. We blasted away space invaders that looked almost as good as the ones in the video arcade, only for free, and for hours on end. It was a pointless waste of time, but it signified the transition of computer technology from work and industry into our personal lives.

And in a sense, it wasn’t a waste of time. What these games were doing was engaging us with the new technology. It engaged our brains in how to communicate with the computer. It engaged our fingers to the keyboard. It got kids using them in schools, and established a legion of programmers who thrived on the idea of creating their own software tools. It was warming us up to the expansion of computer technology, and it did by giving us a reason to use them, no matter how mundane that reason.

Which is exactly what this game playing robot signifies. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a keen observer of new technologies, is convinced that robotics stands to take the world by storm today, much as the personal computer took the world in the early 80’s. The computer didn’t take the world because of some leap in technology, but rather, because of some change in public perception and behavior. Robotics, and mechanized electronic devices, it would seem, are coming into this new public perception, and it starts with games.

Or in this case, a game playing robot.

The robot is really an assembly of established technology. A machine vision camera, often used in industry for identifying objects on an assembly line (in this case, looking for colored dots moving down the video screen) is placed in front of the game screen. The images picked up by the camera are collected and analyzed on the computer next to it. The computer looks for patterns, such as a red dot, or a green dot. If the pattern is distinctive enough (such as a BIG red dot) the computer will trigger the correct button on the guitar robot to press the corresponding red button on the guitar. This is more or less what our brain should be doing to move our fingers, but as we are all human and prone to mistakes, we can never achieve 100% accuracy. Neither can the computer, but the results are significantly better than any human player would hope to achieve. This is all standard technology in industry, but an example such as this shows just how soon we may be bringing robotics into our homes.

Don’t want a game playing robot? What about a car that perceives the road and drives for you? Robotic controls don’t drink lattes and fall victim to fits of road rage; machine vision could make safer decisions with the same visual input to get you safely to your destination. What about cooking? Couldn’t this same vision technology soon be making us dinner at home? It is a lot to forecast, but really, who would have envisioned a global phenomenon such as the Internet while assembling blocks in a game of Tetris?

I share these innovative bits of technology because they represent the shape of times to come. Even if it may look like a waste of time.

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  By ben, April 26, 2009 @ 9:42 am

  I need this robot. I simply can’t be bothered to play Guitar Hero any more.

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