If you’re looking to get up close and personal with some goats and pigs, I wouldn’t recommend the petting zoo being held at the FRAC Center in France.
Visitor reaches out to touch one of the robotic “animals.” (Image via Minimaforms)
Instead of your traditional farm animals, you’ll find an environment filled with animal robots (more like plastic octopus tentacles hanging from the ceiling).
The “Petting Zoo” exhibit was created by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos, founders of design firm Minimaforms, and contains three types of “animals” that can respond and interact with visitors just like live animals at a real petting zoo.
Robots are displayed from the ceiling in this zoo. (Image via Minimaforms)
Even though they appear to be simple plastic neon tubes that hang from the ceiling, these “animals” can actually track visitors via Kinect sensors in order to “understand” how a human in interacting with them and then respond accordingly.
(Image via Minimaforms)
The robots are programmed with a data system called Process that allows them to synchronize their movements with each other and interact with their visitors.
How do they work?
According to Minimaform, “real-time camera streams are processed and coupled with blob tracking and optical flow analysis to locate positions and gestural activity of participants.”
(Image via Minimaforms)
They’re so real that they can even behave differently if they go on display in a different town.
“The pets take on the characteristics of their respective context. They could radically exhibit different personalities depending on the city they’re in,” Theodore Spyropoulos told ABC News.
The robots will change color based on their mood. Beware if they turn red. (Image via Minimaforms)
Maybe one day this robot zoo will come to a city near you, and you can pet some robots instead of boring old goats.
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