I just ran across possibly the most awesome Star Wars item ever. Nikko America has a special edition remote controlR2-D2 home theater audio/video projector that does just about everything. It has a ton of features, including being able to project on the ceiling (not sure I’d ever use that), official sounds, and a ton of inputs including an iPod dock. The tech specs are pretty good, but I’m sure you can build your own home theater that is better with less than the $2900 price tag. It won’t have the massive geek factor that R2-D2 has though. Be sure to check out the video to see it in action.
2 thoughts on “R2-D2 Limited Edition Home Theater Projector by Nikko”
Oh, wow, and I thought the alarm clock was super cool. This is amazing!
Odd, looks like the website is down. It was a pretty good concept, but I think it was more of a gimmick than anything else. I vaguely remember that it was very expensive.
Tonight with my wife, I watched an interesting episode of Nova titled “The World’s Smartest Machine.” Romantic, right? You can tell we are a couple of geeks at heart. Being a huge fan of Asimov and his robot creations, I am continually amazed at the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a kid I was playing chess as early as the 3rd grade. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good chess player. When I heard about a computer that supposedly could beat a world champion chess player, I was intrigued. Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and won, however he eventually lost a rematch in 1997. Well, IBM is back at it, this time taking on Jeopardy. Nova takes us behind the scenes with the developers of “Watson,” the next step in AI. I was disappointed when the episode ended and it didn’t say who won. I didn’t realize until logging on PBS.org that the contest actually was taking place while I was watching Nova (on my media center PC). After some frantic Google searches, I eventually came across a Twitter feed with a link to a Youtube posting of the episode. This was not quite 2 hours after the episode aired! Isn’t technology great? I expect the Youtube post to be served a DMCA take down, so watch it soon if you plan on it. In addition to the episode at the end of this post, I’ve embedded the Nova preview and an humorous parody of the challenges Watson overcame during his development. I suggest watching the Nova episode first. If you are at all interested in AI, you must check these out!
There are two more nights to the match, airing Tuesday February 15th, and Wednesday the 16th. Be sure to check them out, along with some live blogging on PBS.org. I find myself rooting for Watson, not because I want to see humans defeated, but because I want to see humans capable of making something smart enough to do it. Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win?
I just ran across a cool video of a flying robot playing Jingle Bells on an electric piano. The tempo seemed a bit off, so I clicked through to YouTube to see if there were any more videos. A link for how it works popped up, so naturally I clicked it. Base off of the video, it looks like a human was controlling the robot, so not as impressive as I initially thought. They show some background on “co-pilot” routines that assist the human controllers to keep them from making mistakes. I find this interesting because eventually with AI, these little machines could be completely automated. This reminds me of the creepy surveillance robots from Dark Angel. With special routines to keep these from bumping into obstacles, I can definitely see them flying around our cities sometime in the near future. If you want to see the Jingle Bells video, click through the via link at the bottom. I found this video more interesting though.
I just got a Stumble to Pharyngula’s science blog that has a link to a YouTube video of Isaac Asimov. He is speaking about what he thought the top science story of 1988 was. I like running across videos of him speaking because it is nice to put a voice and face to my favorite author. The video goes out of sync about half way through unfortunately. Check it out!
Oh, wow, and I thought the alarm clock was super cool. This is amazing!
Odd, looks like the website is down. It was a pretty good concept, but I think it was more of a gimmick than anything else. I vaguely remember that it was very expensive.