Eva the android and the creepy robot pirates
Not a Vegas lounge act, but a project by David Hanson, a doctoral student at the University of Texas's Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering. David has gone very far into facial-expression recognition… too far, in fact — we're pretty sure we'll have nightmares after having seen these two videos. Now, we see a lot of ridiculous-looking robots, and a fair number of downright creepy droids, cross the news desk here at Engadget, but we have never seen a robot with a goatee and an eye patch (okay, Disneyworld, but that doesn't count). Nor have we seen anything quite as disturbing as the facial-expressions exhibited by Eva, a poor victim of advances in elastomer material sciences, whose lot in life is as a neck sprouting awkwardly from a table. Peep the videos, friends, but your retinas will never be quite the same.
Video: Robot pirate [.mov / .wmv]
Video: Eva the unfortunate [.mov]
