At the forefront of Artificial Intelligence

Sony Spring Festival 2004 at Mediage

By James Matthews

Generation5 had the opportunity to visit Sony's Spring Festival at Mediage in Odaiba, Tokyo. The exhibition was intended to showcase all Sony's latest technologies - including Qrio. The first thing I saw when I walked in was Qrio playing simple putting golf.

Qrio plays Golf

Qrio was a little larger than I'd imagined, and had a little golf putter attached to his left hand. Qrio would look around announcing what he was doing through the speech synthesis software. Once Qrio had spotted the ball, he looked for the hole - I'm assuming all this recognition was done through the bright colours that both the ball and hole were painted in. Next, Qrio walked around to the side of the ball to take his shot. Qrio's movement is very fluid, lacking any of the jerky movement characteristic of the AIBO range. Qrio then turned 90 degrees on the spot and moved the club into position. After striking the ball, Qrio tracked the ball as it moved toward the hole and then commented on his shot (which wasn't all that good!).

Another area had another Qrio moving between coloured circles:

You can somewhat see how Qrio tracks that circles, since he is capable of looking nearly straight down when stood upon his target.

Another exhibition was a Qrio on static display for picture purposes. Before any picture was taken, Qrio would wave at the camera making for quite an amusing picture. I'll reserve my picture with Qrio for future archival purposes!

The ERS-7 was also on static display, but bizarrely had nowhere near the amount of exposure Qrio did. There was only one ERS-7 present on the exhibition floor (as opposed to 3 Qrios), and it was demonstrated within a very small area. Nevertheless, I got to see how it interacts, and I must admit that the ERS-7 seems to react to the environment and people a lot better than previous models have done.

The final show was on the Qrio stage that showed four Qrios in a highly-orchestrated but immensely amusing display of dancing and talking. The dancing showed off the power and flexibility of the actuators; the fluidity and speed at which Qrio can move his limbs has to be seen to be appreciated.

The speech synthesis was also nicely demonstrated. Before the actual show started there was a pre-show video that played that showed the four robots singing together. The voices are hard to explain; while sounding distinctly synthetic, they are easy to understand and can articulate Japanese words just fine. I'll be interested to see how this method of speech synthesis works for English. Nevertheless, each robot was given its own voice (although it seemed this was just an altered base pitch), and each robot managed to evoke its own personality quite well. Again, the show was probably completely orchestrated but it was a marvel to behold.

Sony is definitely on to a winner with Qrio - but at an estimated price of a luxury car each, don't expect to be putting on your own Qrio show any time soon.

Submitted: 31/03/2004

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