Look who’s roaming the red carpet
The paparazzi bots are five autonomous robots, each standing at the height of an average human. These robots won’t vacuum your floor or take out your trash but they will play on your lust for the limelight, provided you catch their interest.
With increasingly smaller cameras as part of mobile phones or surveillance technologies, there’s a a high probability we’ve all had our photos snapped without realizing it. Furthermore, the recent emergence of social networks on the web promotes the circulation of images of ourselves— have we been ¨celebritized¨?
If the answer in no, send in the paparazzi bots! Fascinated by techno culture evolution, Ken Rinaldo, director of the Art and Technology program at Ohio State University, created the paparazzi bots to make a statement about society’s obsession with celebrity image.
These crowd-loving robots move around on their own using infrared sensors and face detectors that pick up on smiles to guide them towards humans. They decide when to snap the perfect shot then upload it directly onto social networks on the web.
You can’t program this robot to become your personal photographer! Instead it’s up to you to strike a pose and flash a smile to get its attention. By the looks of it you won’t be the only one whose after it- what makes people so intrigued by these robots?