The amalgamation of science and art can be beautiful. Other times: terrifying. Other times one wonders how an artist is able to find enough free time to make a human butt sculpture express human emotions.
But sometimes an experiment can combine all of those qualities. And herein lies Nobuhiro Takahashi's robotic butt.
Using rigid urethane skeleton, life-size model pelvis, and a silicon Gluteus Maximus Actuator (GMA), Takahashi has created SHIRI -- not to be confused with its female iPhone counterpart, Siri -- and it looks very much like a human buttocks.
In the introduction video, which came to us via the wonderful DesignTaxi, a user is shown slapping SHIRI, and also poking at it, thereby making SHIRI "brace," or get really tense. The video also notes that SHIRI can react to "a user’s touch, stroke, or slap" and can twitch or tense up on its own.
When SHIRI is happy, i.e. after a user has creepily stroked it, it "protrudes," or inflates.
SHIRI continues a recent tradition of people creating unsettling, romantic robots in Asia. As you might recall, the team at "Lovotics" recently created robots to aid in other romantic practices -- including long distance relationships, and replacing your missing lover with a tiny surrogate robot.