One of the key steps in the creation of machines is the design, how the user will approach the machine, how intuitive and practical its use is. This is true for both the creation of real machines, like in films, or other cultural works. Carlos Salgado, illustrator and designer responsible for designing Pilgrim 7000, the humanoid robot starring in the film Autómata. As he expressed in the "Robotics, Art and Culture" workshop held last [...]
Last week we had the opportunity to take part in Robocity16, an event organized by the consortium Robocity2030, which celebrates this year its tenth anniversary and is formed by the University Carlos III, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Alcalá, the University King Juan Carlos, the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National University of Distance Education (UNED). Research groups presented their novelties while companies, students and other groups shared space [...]
Anyone who lived during the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, has felt in their own flesh what it means to be concerned about an imminent war based on sophisticated and powerful missiles between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the presidential term of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) the US achieved military supremacy over its enemy by a large investment in military technology, paying the price of an impoverished country with great [...]
"An English engineer on holiday in France after Waterloo, discovers looms: programmable mechanisms!". That is the beginning of the last track of “Un dígito binario dudoso” (An iffy binary digit), a record by Hidrogenesse dedicated to the mathematician Alan Turing in 2012, to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Turing is considered the father of artificial intelligence and computing and he was, up to the seventies of the twentieth century, an anonymous hero of the [...]
Thanks to Martine Verhoeven's unprejudiced vision, the film RoboCop (1987) became the icon of science fiction of the eighties and still survives as such. Without her vision, the film might have never been shot. Jon Davison, producer of the project, had contacted all talented directors he knew, but without exception they rejected the offer because they did not want such an apparently simple science fiction story to tarnish their film careers. Its title was, above [...]
The Enlightenment was an exciting time in which the unprejudiced progress of science and thought allowed new wonders to cause great sensation in society. One of them was the manufacture of automata, thanks to the perseverance, creativity and technical and physiological knowledge of its creators, mimicked living beings. Such is the case of the flute player created by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), a lifesize shepherd presented to the French Academy [...]
If there is a personality who has represented the paradigm of union between science, technology and art, that is Leonardo da Vinci, who created the first humanoid automaton known to us, who of course, had military purposes. In the case of Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1619) his particular circumstances merged his outstanding intellectual abilities with some special conditions that allowed him to develop his talent. The illegitimate eldest son of the notary Ser [...]
El Caleidoscopio presents one of its most ambitious projects today, the ROS Film Festival, an online short film festival where the attention will be focused on robots, who have a leading role in all the works submitted to the competition. Following our philosophy of merging science and culture, we concentrate on robotics and cinema, two worlds wherethe boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred, allowing us to recreate and imagine future scenarios that are often [...]
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