@steve: referencing tommy above, i’d say it’s along the lines of: designers are realizing that nature is a fabulous engineer, and mimicking lifeforms is probably a good design strategy.

so, it’s interesting to me that the *movement* is resulting in an emotional reaction – ie not only is is good (ie efficient) design, but it’s transmitting far more information than a robot on wheels.

and maybe that’s how I should have phrased it: that movement transmits an enormous amount of information that we perhaps overlook.

Usually these attachments are built on the stories that surround, for instance, our teddy bears – stories we create. In the case of cartoons, it’s other people’s stories.

But there’s something different, exciting, and scary happening here. Watch this, and tell me what you feel when a) the guy kicks the machine, and b) the machine slips on the ice.

PC gamers have known this feeling well for years. In a well-constructed universe where the characters are clearly presented and defined, you quickly build “bonds” and affection for different inhabitants of the game universe (this is different than film or literature, where the user is a passive consumer of “other people’s stories”). There are cooperative war games games where mixed teams of AI and human players compete against groups; the human players can respawn / be revived when they die, whereas the AI players cannot – once they are gone, they are gone for good. You see the human players protecting the AI ones much more ferociously than their fellow humans.

It’s probably a peculiar sight to a non-gamer.

I found it heartbreaking watching the machine try to keep its balance on the ice. “Go little guy, go!” I thought. And I thought the guy was a real jerk for kicking it… yet I’ve kicked many a machine that hasn’t done what I wanted it to do.

Like Zeke, I didn’t have the same reaction as you since I knew the context (US Military funding, the guy kicking is just one of the developers testing it, it’ll probably be less cute once it’s mounted with rifles and toxic gas grenades, etc).

It is said that some part of the personality of the designer always finds its way into their creation. There are probably several scientific reasons why the machines moves the way it does, but also a few non-scientific ones, ie “This is the way I think a mule should walk, based on how I’ve seen mules walk in the past.”

The same, again, goes for in-game AI characters – many of them share lots of traits with their developers, and afford a level of involvement and interactivity with the player that you don’t get from reading a book or watching a film.

I think that, those feelings would have been totaly different if the robots had wheel instead of legs. Except if you are in a wheelchair i guess !? ;)

but you better shape up soon, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGxdgNJ_lZM

As for the wind/walker, that’s amazing.

But don’t you think even on the level of emotional response there is a qualitative difference between looking at a moving wind-powered scaffolding and looking at a robotic war dog?

There was for me, the context of their creation and the aesthetics and philosophies at work in the creation are so clearly present as difference in the two forms.

Just wondering?

how do you feel when it’s slipping on the ice?

BigDog was (and is) funded by and for the US Army. Becoming emotional about it strikes me as being sorta like calling a gun “cute.”