There I was last night, idly scrolling on my phone looking for interesting hardware news, when I stumbled across this absolute monstrosity, this dream-haunter, this affront to all that is good in this world. Okay, so it’s a pretty cool lip-syncing robot mouth project, but the results are so horrifying I demand that it be thrown into the ocean immediately.
The creator of this… thing is YouTuber Ancient, who’s been iterating on a “sphere o’ mouths” concept for robot lip-syncing (via Hackaday). Essentially, it’s a custom designed, 3D-printed ball of various mouth shapes, mounted inside a doll’s head and spun in various configurations so only one mouth is visible through the gaping maw in the front at any one time.
(Image credit: Ancient)
A stepper motor attached to a mechanism inside the frame spins the ball under the control of a Raspberry Pi, and the horrifying… I mean, intriguing result you see at the end of the video above is the result of part automation, part manual lip syncing to a selection of tunes. Oh, and did I mention there’s a custom brow-moving device, too?
In fact, even our jolly fellow’s hat appears to be custom designed and 3D-printed, making this project surprisingly in-depth. I’ve got a feeling that Ancient knows full well how horrifying the end result is, though, as they’ve chosen to forgo any sort of video narration, resulting in just over 13-minutes of clicks, clunks, whirrs, and eventually, a musical end result.
Is it the hiss before it launches into a rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song” that causes the hairs on the back of my neck to rise, I wonder? Or the strange gurning the robot seems to perform in-between verses? No, I think the truly horrifying thing here is the vacant stare behind the eyes, combined with an unintentional glare that suggests it’s looking right through me.
Ugh. The uncanny valley effect is a well-documented phenomenon at this point, but as “eerie or unsettling” goes, this terrible machine takes the biscuit for me. It’s also very impressive in terms of concept and design, so I have to give top marks to Ancient, before taking them all away again and casting their creation into the fires of Mt. Doom.
It deserves no place in this world, I’m afraid, but I’ve got a funny feeling you might see something similar turning up in a horror game at some point soon. Goody.
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