'Somewhere on a shelf in a cavernous warehouse in Alabama rests the life-like noggin of Philip K. Dick, quietly dreaming of electric sheep. Or maybe the robotic head of the legendary sci-fi author got blown up.
These are among the possible explanations for the bizarre disappearance of an artist's homage to Dick. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. This tale of loss should start from the beginning.
'It's a story as strange as anything PKD ever wrote - a body of work that includes the short stories behind the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly. It involves, naturally, a robot, a group of confused humans, and a series of misunderstandings. The head was built by David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics. The self-described sculptor-roboticist, who has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and did some undergrad work in AI, specializes in creating amazingly realistic robot faces sheathed in a rubbery polymer he calls f'rubber. The bots have a wide range of facial expressions driven by dozens of tiny servomotors. They make eye contact with passersby through motion-tracking machine vision and can engage in complex conversations via AI speech software. They even recognize familiar faces.' (Wired magazine article).
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