As you can see from this video, someone has succeeded in creating nothing less than a remote control bicycle riding robot Hatsune Miku, inspired by the robot toy you see in the video.
The video gives plenty of interesting (and visually self explanatory) details on how the robot was made, and you can see the appealing sight of some MikuMiku riding at the end.
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The Hiroshima Animation Biennale is set to hold an expo on Japan’s glorious history of robot anime, incidentally marking the 80th year of Tetsuwan Atom creator Osamu Tezuka’s life. The exhibition will run for 20 days from August the 7th, and funnily enough it will be held in Hiroshima. If Hiroshima is too far from the plamo lined streets of Akiba for you, it will apparently tour the whole country after wrapping up in Hirohima.
Screenings of works and giant scale figures are promised; they are apparently hoping for 400,000 visitors across all their related events. No word on if there will be any Tachikoma in evidence. See also interesting revelations regarding an International Gundam Research Society here. Via Anime!Anime!
A research society with the scholarly aim of studying Gundam? Apparently so – the news is gleaned from details of the upcoming Robot Anime Expo. From the limited details available it appears they will unfortunately be concerned with social and cultural ramifications and the like, as well as such essential questions as how mankind should interact with alien races, rather than the business of building giant robot killing machines. It may be interesting to see how this pans out. Via Anime!Anime!
This demonic robo is sure to terrify adults and children alike, and certainly makes me glad that the predominant robot aesthetic is of giant armoured killing machines and sultry temptroids, at least outside of companies trying to market hospital bots in place of Filipino nurses. And the price? A mere ¥450,000 (about $1,000,000 if current trends continue). Better to content yourself with a robot that can’t talk, but does perform reasonably well at oppressing animals.
For this foray, I’ve had a look around the robotics hobby shop “Robot Kingdom” (ツクモロボット王国), run by very reasonable Akiba PC chain Tsukumo, on the 3rd floor of their “パソコン本店” flagship PC department store. I’ve always been very interested in robotics, and Japan is the world leader in this field; not only that, it even has a vibrant hobby robotics scene. So checking out the robot hobby shops in Akihabara is naturally something I have been keen to get around to, and post about.
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