Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Boston Dynamics

It already has 8 million hits since yesterday, so you've probably seen it.

I'll bet they had a lot of fun with this.  Who needs CGI?


8 comments:

  1. I saw that yesterday, but not with the music. Da music MAKES it!

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  2. Last I checked, the Boston Dynamics stuff was CGI.

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  3. Really? Where can I know that? I must have gotten this badly wrong.

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  4. https://futurism.com/the-byte/cgi-video-military-robot-flipping-table-guns

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  5. I believe the purpose of CGI in most movies is more to put real live actors in environments that either would be too costly to create or approximate on Earth, or literally don't exist i.e. the typical comic book or space cowboys movie, than to generate non-human actors. It replaces the need to build elaborate sets or do on-location shooting such as venturing into Tunisia for the original Star Wars, to pick a famous example. I believe it has been used to generate some characters (Jar Jar, IIRC) though I think that's more commonly a hybrid technique where an actor in a special suit plays the character and is then 'skinned' in the CGI phase with the desired look.

    I don't think this is the parody video .. there's a more concise description of the parody here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics#In_popular_culture) which indicates it's not a dance video but a film of a robot soldier turning on his creators.

    And here's this video mentioned

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(robot)#What's_new,_Atlas?

    On December 29, 2020, Boston Dynamics released a music video featuring two Atlas robots, a Spot robot, and a Handle robot performing a dance routine to the song "Do You Love Me".

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  6. If it were CGI'd, I'd almost be even more impressed.

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  7. It would be impressive CGI, but I looked into this, and while the parody video has some CGI, this Boston Dynamics is real. You have to remember that their customers are not (or not yet) people who would like to own a cool robot, but very tech-savvy people who need the machines for specific tasks and are going to be investing very big dollars for the privilege. They couldn't possibly keep it a secret if it were CGI, and their customers would consider them frauds thereafter. It's the real deal.

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