All robots are inherently at least a little creepy, but this one is the winner. It’s called SociBot-Mini and it’s basically a disembodied head and torso that can put on your friends’ faces and then analyze your mood and talk to you about it.
A team at Engineered Arts in the U.K. created the desktop bot, which uses a depth-sensing camera to capture and recognize gestures, New Scientist reports. Its software allows it to analyze your grimaces and smiles to assess your overall mood. It’s also equipped with chatbot software, so once it has sized up your feelings, it can talk to you about them. (Hopefully the technology isn’t advanced enough to pinpoint your weaknesses and then use them to bring you down, but we can’t be sure.)
The creepiest part, though, isn’t the abstract concept of a robot being able to determine your feelings. The creepiest part is what you can physically see with your eyes: the 3D screen that projects a face — either a generic one or one based on a headshot. Although, now we kind of want to feed it a headshot of Ryan Gosling and see what happens.
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