Androidal Xenophobia : Comin’ down in 3-part harmony

There used to be a Bee Gees tribute band called the Heebee Geebees…

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… but that’s not them, although it could be. They remind me of one of the very first Arduino Art Projects… wigs that sing when you brush them…

See… these people have natural harmony and rhythm and whatnot. Unlike the dancing robot that from a recent dancing robot competition…

Which for reasons unknown, they’ve dressed up as a schoolgirl – at a single stroke, transforming it from “probably quite impressive” to “actually, slightly weird”.

Speaking of which, we saw that Surrogates with Bruce Willis in it recently – in which people “live” through robots… they don’t actually leave the house themselves, but instead remotely control robotic versions of themselves that have a similar type of dress-sense/polish etc to C-Grade American soap-operas from the 80s. Like everyone has suddently decided to become a Stepford Wife of some sort.

The hell with that – I can’t imagine anyone living through a robotic device without immediately going for the “can fly” option. If I was Bruce Willis I’d have been a bird. That would be cool. I’d be a Bruce Willis bird, and I’d crap on cars. I’d crap on cars a lot.

Speaking of which – I see they just google-street-viewed Pompeii…

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Which is quite fantastic… but a bit boring because that particular bit of Pompeii is a bit fucked really, on account of that volcano in the background blowing up a couple of thousand years ago and trashing it. I actually find the “living” Pompeii a lot more interesting, though perhaps a little less poetically resonant. The new one has Pizzarias and proper Italians and things.

Still… It does conjure (to me at least) this vision I have of UAV tourism… where you hire a little copter type thing that you can “see through” and control over the web from your PC (or phone or whatever) at home – preferably with some of those 3D goggles and a smellovision plugin.

From there it’s a short (cognitive) leap to doing a whole augmented reality number on it… so instead of flying around in 2010, you’re flying around in sometime in 79AD. Mind you, if you were going to do that, you might as well not actually fly a real thing about – you might as well just do the whole thing in simulation… like the thing you’re looking at above. There’s a fine line between photograph and simulation anyway. One so very quickly becomes the other. The moment is everything.

And that’s the thing about augmented reality. You don’t actually need the reality.