Just Like Mombot Used to Make

Just Like Mombot Used to Make (includes photos)

Then, a month later in Nagoya, Japan, the Famen restaurant opened, with two giant yellow robot arms preparing up to 800 bowls of ramen a day. When it’s slow, the robots act out a scripted comedy routine and spar with knives.

“The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,” said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya.

Video of the robots in action
(their scripted goofing around starts about halfway in — all in Japanese)

“How do you get a service robot to interact with humans?” Dr. Rybski asked. “That’s a real hard problem. It’s different when you’re working with a human versus a pipe on an assembly line.”

Imbuing this type of service technology with some sense of playfulness would go a long way to humanizing it.

While not exactly Showbiz Pizza’s Rock-afire Explosion (video — scenes of animatronic characters are at about 30 seconds in), Mr. Nagaya’s Famen restaurant takes a crack at doing just that. 

(via Stand-Up Economist)

TED Talks: “Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world”

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world (video)

Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. [She] asks: Why doesn’t the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we’re surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment.

From her TED profile page filled with fascinating geeky goodness: 

McGonigal directs game R&D at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit forecasting firm where she developed Superstruct, a massively multiplayer game in which players organize society to solve for issues that will confront the world in 2019. She masterminded World Without Oil, which simulated the beginning of a global oil crisis and inspired players to change their daily energy habits. McGonigal also works with global companies to develop games that build on our collective-intelligence infrastructure — like The Lost Ring, a mystery game for McDonald’s that became the world’s biggest alternate reality game, played by more than 5 million people. (Not to mention the delightful Top Secret Dance-Off, which taps that space in our brains where embarrasment and joy mingle.) She’s working on book called Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Change the World.

“Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.”
— Jane McGonigal

NYTimes: “Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss”

Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss

At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing. Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.

The school is one of a growing number across the country that are reining in recess to curb bullying and behavior problems, foster social skills and address concerns over obesity. They also hope to show children that there is good old-fashioned fun to be had without iPods and video games.

In extreme circumstances, I can see a “recess coach” as a good thing — as a temporary measure to achieve the stated goals. But instituting this broadly or in a permanent way is a mistake. Unstructured free play is an essential part of play and children’s development.

Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”

Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.

Right on, Dr. Barros.

Rock Paper Scissors Playing Glove

Rock Paper Scissors Playing Glove by Steve Hoefer

I love it when computers can interact with us on our own terms. Keyboards and mice were made so machines could watch what we do. But we have to learn how to use keyboards and mice … so the machines can understand us. But the mouse was invented almost 50 years ago and the keyboard almost 300 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot in that time, and so should our interfaces. We shouldn’t have to learn how to use technology.

So here is a glove that can play Rock Paper Scissors … against a person and the person doesn’t have to learn a thing.  Just put the glove on and play and the glove will play against you.

It remembers how you play so that if you always open with Rock it will tend to open with Paper. And if you tend throw a Paper after a Rock it will counter it with Scissors. The glove’s current record for best-of-five matches against me is 71 wins and 62 losses.

It strikes as entirely natural that Hoefer would find inspiration in something playful for a new, very natural Human Computer Interface.

(via Engadget)

Hospital + Theme Park? Cough. Does my forehead feel warm?

The lobby of the Walt Disney Pavilion at Florida Hospital for Children features several interactive activities and experiences that children of all ages can enjoy to ultimately enhance patient experience. For example, kids can fish for virtual salmon, step into a safari to touch and illuminate markings on a cave wall, generate jungle sounds on musical step pads, swat chirping bugs that glow during an engaging game that tests memory skills or play in a magical world of bubbles and dancing creatures from under the sea.

Preview of Walt Disney Pavilion at Florida Hospital (includes photos)

If we hold true that treatment and recovery entails more than just medical science, then why shouldn’t hospitals incorporate playfulness into their very design? Like they say, laughter is the best medicine…