08/03/2006
Top 5 Strangest Japanese Inventions
5. USB-Powered Shirt Fans
4. Eyeball Robot
Created by ATR/Systec Akazawa, the strange Muu Socia 3.0 eyeball robot "interacts using voice recognition, speech and even face recognition".The CYBER CYCLOPS is designed, ugly enough, to serve as an ice-breaker between doctors and patients. It freaks out if you put your hand in front of its eyeball[Source]
3. AA Battery-Powered Plane
Powered by 160 AA Oxyride batteries , this plane "soared five meters (16 feet) above the ground at a private airport owned by Honda Motor Co."."This was officially the world's first manned flight powered by dry-cell batteries, in the second test the plane soared two meters above ground and flew some 400 meters almost independently," Zushi said[ Source]
2. Wearable Gaze Detector
The idea is the Gaze Detector would record everything you're looking at, so later on you could watch a movie of your day with an accompanying "attention marker" pointing out exactly what held your gaze. Paired with a Web browser, the program could automatically call up information on the objects you looked at[Source]
1. Scientist Creates Robot Clone
Hiroshi Ishiguro -- "a senior researcher at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Japan" -- has created a robot clone of himself.Created using casts of his body, his robot doppelganger sits and fidgets, looks around and taps his toe just like his creator. Ishiguro actually created this robot to, no joke, fill in for him in the classroom at Osaka University, where he's a professor[Source]
Honorable Mention - Cup Noodles Cap with Timer
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