Examining our shifting relationship with technology in the time of corona. — In my previous blog post talking about our project, I examined society’s relationship with AI, and how that is reflected in our collective’s immersive art project Laila. …

In my previous post, I detailed how we at the Ekho Collective began our project of building an immersive opera experience for The Finnish National Opera and Ballet. In this post, I discuss what inspires the story we are concocting for our future visitors. Hyperbolic Futures In media, AI is often seen…

Metaballs, chaos equations, predators and their prey. Contemporary dance, neurological time travel, memories of the future. Potatoes. What does all of this mean? To explain it all to you, we’ll need to travel a few steps back in time, into May 2019… What’s this Neon Green, Cool-Looking Competition Thing? In April 2019, a buzz from the tech…

A pilot study by roboticists and autism therapy providers — A year ago in Spring 2018, I conducted a pilot study of a robot teaching sign language to children with autism. This blog post reflects on the results of the study, and our team’s process of designing the robot. The entire study is available as: Axelsson, M., Racca, M., Weir…

How we built an emotive social robot to guide library customers to books — The Oodi library Our team at Futurice designed and built a social robot to guide people to books at Helsinki’s new central library, Oodi. Opened in 2018, Oodi is the biggest of Helsinki’s 37 public libraries. It has 10,000 visitors a day, and an estimated 2 million visitors a year (compared to Finland’s…

How we reached young audiences combining robotics with e-sports — What on Earth? Ever heard of anything like it before? Me neither. The robot was created as part of Futurice’s project with Yle, the national broadcast company of Finland. Yle produces content for TV, radio, and the web. It has a broad reach of older audiences, but has had trouble reaching younger ones…

Made of Metal: Philosophical Discussions between 1st Graders and a Robot — 1,5 years ago I operated an InMoov robot for Guerilla films’ documentary “Outouden laakso” (a reference to the uncanny valley, a concept examining the likeability of humanoid robots), or “Who Made You?”. Yes, spoiler alert, the white humanoid robot shown in the beginning and end of the documentary indeed had…

This blog post is about the Finnish Arms Export Report that Futurice created in collaboration with SaferGlobe. Arms exports is a controversial subject. Opinions are widely diverse among different groups like journalists, peace activists, arms manufacturers, politicians, you and me, and everyone has their own agenda. …

This blog post is about the InMoov robot, designed as open source by sculptor Gael Langevin and built by Spice Program at Futurice . You can read more about how and why we built this robot here. There’s nothing exciting about a digital blackjack table. All the casinos have it…