Pixar’s Luxo Jr. has been a staple of the studio’s opening credits for decades. He appears in front of the PIXAR logo and hops up onto the capital “I,” jumping on it until he squashes it and then has to take its place. Now, engineers at Apple have brought Luxo Jr. to life off the screen.
In a paper on Apple’s Machine Learning Research site, the team described the project and provided a video of the real-life Luxo Jr. in action. According to the paper, one of the purposes of designing the robot to act like Luxo Jr. was to gauge people’s reactions to it, because it’s a robot that mimics human-like behavior.
For example, a person who wants the lamp to illuminate something has to wave at it to get its attention, and then it swivels its “head” toward them in response. Once it’s shining where they want it to, it periodically makes small movements like tilting or getting an inch closer, as if it is interested in what they are looking at. The paper found that these “expression-driven movements significantly enhance user engagement and perceived robot qualities.”
