A couple of university students from a local Chinese university went all this trouble to make their own life-sized Transformers as part of the graduation project, as far as what I heard.  It’s a very interesting project for them to get into.  And it’s a 4500  USD project too.  That’s a great prize tag they put aside for this project’s funding.

Boy! They sure come out bigger than life, after looking at these amazing photos of 9-m tall monstrosity!

Such amazing detail of the character design based on one of the Chinese famous legends of “Romance of the Three Kingdom”.  For those who are not familiar with the Chinese folklore legend, there’s this famous general from a Shu Army whose name is Guan Yu during Chinese ancient times.  He’s one of the most powerful generals serving in the Shu army and many legendary tales have been fortold amongst the Chinese for many, many generations.  Chinese have profound religious beliefs tied with him and you can find a lot of statues of him around China and other Chinese communities around the world.  That’s probably why the Chinese students picked him as the favourite character.

If you ever played one of Koei’s infamous action game series Dynasty Warriors and you used this character. (see below)

This is him and that’s why the transformer’s color resembles a lot as the picture above, along with the halberd weapon.

And here’s the footage of the CGI animation of its transformation as well.

Pretty neat huh? ^^

Source: Kotaku, Gadgetsin, ClonedChina, All images and copyrighted by the source owner

Well… I thought it was going to be one, but nope! After I browse the material on CartoonLeap’s link on this subject, I was totally gutted that Apple hasn’t gotten on the next product phenomenon with this. It would be nice to see if they can produce another i-series product line in this phase since Sony has ceased their revolutionary humanoids of robot lines, Aibo, a few years ago. This should be Apple’s next greatest chance of product development in place!

But, sadly… No. It’s not going to be like. Instead, someone took their ‘creative’ trouble to make full use of Iphone applications to come up with something like this.

Seeing as how ‘inventive’ the Japanese has gotten far with this clever attachment of Iphone onto the electronic equipment and computed its apps to operate its limbs accordingly, I reckon they should come up with top ten new applications when attached to a robot. It would be far more entertaining than what other technie review site could say about iPhone’s best apps. I mean wouldn’t it be interesting to have your on robot that’s got best functionality of ins and outs of iPhone, without needing you touching the screen?  Also, think about the pros and cons behind these and somehow we can formulate advantages that benefit us mankind hugely!  Not convince?

Well… Let me see. What are the top best iPhone apps you can go with this?

1. Vacuum the carpets (while you go watch your favour program on tv)
2. Wash the gutters and drains (no more back stretching)
3. Wash the car (hey, it may work out, you never know)
4. Lawn the mower on Sunday ( which you never ever bother to do them many summers ago)
5. Get the newspapers (Okay, a little lame,  but I needed to put something on this list!)
6. Give you a massage (Well, still better than playing a masseuse, if not affordable)
7. Does grocery shopping for you (Nice!)
8. Clean house ie bathtub, toilets, sink etc. (Make sure the model’s water-resistant. Highly recommended!)
9. Take your pet for a walk (I don’t have any pets of my own, but you get the idea :))
10. And lastly, it goes to work on your behalf, while you stay at home with your jammies on, watching Dr Phil. (This deserves two thumbs up, IMHO.)

So there you go, top ten useful applications with Iphone robot.  What more could you better ask for? Technology is after all there to make our lives easier and grant us more stress free and hopefully someone out there would think far ahead with these ‘useful’ suggestions.

Otherwise, we can always refer to this as well, if we can’t get everything above.  We’ll be very self-sufficient from the start.

Beer Robot

Whilst everybody in the world (well hopefully almost everybody, if they’re into robots genre like me) are all getting hyped and excited with the upcoming Michael Bay’s/Steven Spielberg’s Transformers 2 the movie within less than 3 weeks time from now, I decidedly got onto the net, finding any interesting articles, facts people shared about our ‘friendly robots in diguise’.  And towards the middle of the night, as I was about to stop browsing after failing to find  anything within 2 hours, I stumbled upon a link that really got my eyebrows raised up a notch.

A writer by the name of Shahendra Ohneswere published his post on the ten most ridiculous things about Transformers G1 we never knew about, even for old school fans like me.  He made a number of very highly critical  yet insightful comments on how certain robot characters were introduced to the TV audience and their backgrounds were vague and less convincing when it comes to any ‘realism’.  His arguments are when Tranformers were to perform any heroic activities during the series or the way their transformation sequence goes, we never asked ourselves why on earth Transformers were to do such things in the series and they simply do not make logical sense to the ordinary viewers who would know Transformers can’t possibly do that (eg 9-foot Giant Megatron transforms into a puny 12-inch handgun???), if their intellect serves them best.

After reading his post halfway, despite they indeed bring out the important points of logic and human common sense we all normally possess, the fact is true that when Transformers G1 first came out 20+ years ago, our generation were very young and naive (come on, this is 1985 we’re talking about here!). So as a kid, we always believe everything we saw on TV.  We’re ‘entitled’ to it so rationale and lateral thinking is not expected.  In fact, we don’t even care. So why bother? Maybe now you do, as you look back and you’re thinking “Right… That was a dumb thing they do.  But nevertheless it was all the while fun :)”.

Anyway here’s the link below.  I’m sure you’ll find them enlightening to read as much as I do, especially the comment on Autobot’s Blaster was once portrayed as the African-American stereotypes in the 1980s!

http://www.streetlevel.com/2009/06/04/the-top-10-most-ridiculous-transformers-ever

Also when you get to the bottom of his post, be sure to read out a cool Transformer Ravage USB memory stick or Blaster Netbook USB Port!  They’re great!!!