ANS TechGlance

This reminds me of the famous movie film screened more than 40 years ago.  HAL was the name of computer that kicked out people from the space ship because it learnt the people's minds from their lips that they had questions on HAL's loyalty. Growing with further development of hardware and software capabilities, this humanoid robot may have the capability that controls real humans. I hope it will not come true and real even in the future space where highly intelligent humanoid robots will have to have strict limitation not to control humans. 8/24/11

It used to be a dream for us to speak in our own language on the phone with any people who may not understand our language.  The dream seems to be becoming real at least between Japanese and English on a mobile phone network.  The accuracy of the simultaneous interpretation is reportedly not perfect yet, but that'd be OK as far as the accuracy is in a reasonable range. For the time being, the text messages simultaneously displayed on the phone screens in the both languages will help to avoid potential misunderstanding which might be caused by inaccurate interpretations. If bandwidth allows to accommodate this simultaneous interpretation and video phone capability, it'd be more helpful. 8/22/11 Source: DiginfoTV via YouTube

We are receiving many emails, kind words and notes from outside of Japan.  Two typical messages say, " I do believe that your country people can overcome all the problems, above all, for Japan, the characteristic of your people is united & pursuit the best level all the time, where is valued to be respected." and " Japan is a strong and industrious nation, people would get through from such disasters  We believe it will recover soon.  Please accept our deepest sympathy and convey our best wishes to all of you" The magnitude of the earthquake that hit Japan has been reportedly the largest in the recorded history. No one can measure an overall impact to Japan society caused by the natural disaster at this point.  Finding more, the damages becomes bigger. We still are  in rescue and fact finding modes. However, i t’s for sure that the Japan society should be able to overcome the extraordinary difficulties, although  the big earthquake is causing catastrophic dama

This seems to be a typical product made by a sophisticated consortium formed up by The Niigata Industrial Creation Organization, Hitachi,  Takei Scientific Instruments Co.,Ltd. and NEDO.  The Niigata  The Niigata Industrial Creation Organization and Hitachi reportedly provided Takei with exercise methods and robot technology, which they developed as part of a project funded by NEDO.  In general "exercise" is "exercise" and it's sometimes boring. Building entertainment functions into the training or exercising process is good for continuous effort of exercising for a long time although it seems to be a matter of cost and performance. Source: DigInfo TV via YouTube 2/7/11

This newly designed EV look good for entertainment and hobby but could be quite useful for sightseeing in traditional cities in Japan, like Kyoto, Nara etc. It might be also applicable in East Asia, too. A price plan sounds quite reasonable. Try it? Source: DigInfo Tv via YouTube 2/7/11

Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Institute (AIST) announced that Humanoid Research Group of AIST had developed new software, "Chorenoid", to directly generate and edit the whole-body motion of a humanoid robot. Its news release says, " This software automatically and instantaneously converts a sequence of humanoid poses (key poses) input by the user to a dynamically stable movements, enabling a user without knowledge of robotics to generate various humanoid movements easily in a similar manner to the generation of a computer graphic character's motions. This technology is expected to contribute to the creation of new content industries using humanoid robots. " The following video demonstrates a dancing cybernetic humanoid robot HRP-4C. It is expected that the software will create a new market for TV, PCs,  games and other entertainment areas. Source: AIST's news release 1/9/11