Philip K. Dick Returns as an Android

Posted 22 Jun 2005 at 18:49 UTC by steve

Showing once again that reality is stranger than fiction, Philip K. Dick has returned from the dead via FedEx. "In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers are creating a lifelike, android portrait of one of America's well-known science-fiction writers Philip K Dick." Among the FedEx-sponsored team is David Hanson, best known to robots.net readers as the creator of K-Bot, an android copy of his girlfriend. Much of the work was done at UTA's Automation and Robotics Research Institute where it was supervised by Paul Williams, a friend of the author. David Hanson's skills provide the life-like android head which reproduces Dick's facial expressions. Other experts have provided face recognition and expression recognition technology for the android. The robot is also said to have full speech recognition and synthesis ability combined with the best in convesational AI. For more, see the Hanson Robotics press release or the PKD-Android homepage (Flash content). You can see the android in a reconstruction of his natural habitat at the Wired Magazine NextFest, June 24-27 in Chicago.

A report on the exhibit, posted 27 Jun 2005 at 14:55 UTC by steve » (Master)

Bill Christensen of Technovelgy writes:

The Philip K. Dick android was eerily cool at NextFest. However, the proximity of the exhibit to the Juke Bot(and Juke Bot's noise) made it difficult to really interact with PKD2.

See http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=410 for the story on how PKD appeared at NextFest. You guys might also like the Juke Bot - see http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=411.

The early look at Next Fest on Friday was a lot of fun; this is the place to be if you are in Chicago this weekend.