some words to not

probably the most publicly important event of the last few months was the completion of my robotic desk lamp.

i've christened it 'aur', which comes both from the hebrew word for light, and the greek 'aura'. also - pronounced a.u.r, the name is reminiscent of the play r.u.r which is the source of the word 'robot'.

in may, in collaboration with m.i.t dramashop, we've put up a play in which the robot plays a character role. the play was written by rony kubat and is entitled 'the confessor'. i have many gripes with several aspects of this production, but it was definitely an important fire test for the robot and the whole idea of robotic actors which i've been thinking about a lot over the last few years. there's no online video of the play yet, but you can watch a highlight reel from the last dress rehearsal.

andrea was the first to write about the robot, but the deluge started a day later, when a teaser was put up on the m.i.t homepage before the last show. this started ramping up a whole series of online press interest in the project (particularly in russia for some reason).

after i put up a concept video of the lamp in motion and what it might be doing one day on m.i.t's new youtube-like video service, dozens of blogs contaminated each other with the story, including some pretty popular tech blogs, like gizmodo, engadget, and the register. most personally flattering to me, though, was aur's inclusion on one of my favorite geek-design sites, popgadget.

somewhat disappointingly, all those blogs just copied the same photo of the lamp from each other, thus making the quick and dirty shot i made over a white foamcore the official press shot of the lamp. as usual - i kick myself a little for not being more p.r. savvy and making sure that there are some great shots of the projects (not to mention some coherent text other than the 5-minute rambling that's on there right now). but at this stage i already know that even when i learn this lesson for the 100th time, i'll be just as lazy the next time i'll finish a project.

the 'official' image of aur

some good pirate souls even put the concept video up on youtube, and one of them decided to mix it to the music from the 1986 disney movie "flight of the navigator", because the lamp reminded him of the robot (?) from that movie.

over the last month i've been conducting a human subject study in which people work together with the robot to solve a game-like task. hopefully the results of this experiment will be in soon, just in time for my upcoming thesis defense. at that time i will also have video of the lamp in action.