First impression of moving robot head

Here are some first impressions how the robot moves the head. Currently my brother has a Rift headset put on and sees what you can see on the monitor.

By moving the headset the robot follows the movement so that you have the feeling that you stand in the room of the robot.

First prototype

Robot head with VR headset

The first prototype is ready.

The feeling of "jumping into another body" is ... strange. Sure one can talk about it and discuss how it would be.

But when you put on the VR headset the first time and then see what the robot head sees in full 3D and then rotate your head and the robot head follows your movements - that is a strange feeling.

The same is for people standing around the robot and watching him moving. When you stand in front of him or move in front of him and he follows your movements then you also get a strange feeling in the neck.

Not because a machine with object tracking does some arithmetics to follow you. But because you know that there is a person somewhere in the world who currently steers the robot. So in your subconscious you think that you have a real person in front of you.

If you also want to create such a robot for yourself, you can find build instructions and software for free in my GitHub repository:

https://github.com/hilderonny/rcr

A video showing the setup and movements will follow soon.

The idea behind

When the movie "Avatar" came into the cinemas, I was impressed by the idea to jump into an avatar's body and to control it. Some years later I got in touch with the InMoov 3D printed robots. It is a full size humanoid robot which one can build for himself.

The same time I played around with the consumer editition of the Oculus Rift and I was impressed how real it feels to have a virtual environment which you can interact with directly with your hands (using the touch controllers).

With all of these impressions an idea was born. What if you have a full size InMoov robot which you can control with the Rift? Imagine you put on the Rift, take the controllers into your hands and start a program which "logs you in" into the robot.

You could see what the robot sees. When you turn your head, the robot does it the same way. When you lift up your arms and move your fingers, the robot does it the same way.

This yould be really cool. But for what? Yust for playing and saying: Yes, I do it because I am able to do it?

No, I think there are many possible use cases for it, just turn your imagination on and think about what you would do with such a system :). Meanwhile I will start constructing it and then I will see for what I can use it.

So stay tuned, updates will follow.

Ronny