Brain power: an inventor uses massive's software to make his creation 'think'.(Artificial Intelligence)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For some time now, digital artists have been making smart CG characters that star in computer games and feature films. But could this virtual AI be just as effective ill the real world? Inventor David Hanson of Hanson Robotics in Dallas thought so. And his prediction was spot on.

The end result is Zeno, a physically constructed robot that uses advanced AI to reason and become smarter over time. Zeno, in fact, is the brainchild of Hanson and the namesake of Hanson's son. Zeno, which resembles a humanoid (albeit with a cartoonish rather than realistic appearance), is a prototype, first unveiled at WIRED NextFest last fall. The inventor hopes to produce the robot as a mass-market consumer product within the next year or so.

"The technology incorporated into Zeno has a huge potential for the consumer home-entertainment market," says Hanson, the company's founder.

While Zeno is new to the world, the company that created it has been operating for approximately five years. Known for developing the most expressive and intelligent conversational character robots today, Hanson Robotics has built a number of offerings that have been featured in Wired Magazine, Popular Science, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe, as well as on a range of television programs, Yet, to build this current-generation robot, Hanson chose to experiment with some technology that was unique to his world.

"I first encountered Massive at the Technology Summit in 2003, where Stephen Regelous [Massive's founder] and I were both nominated for World Technology awards," recalls Hanson. "Something clicked for us both as we realized how deep and common our vision for AI is, and how we could work together to build friendly robots for a better future."

Like Hanson, a groundbreaking developer in the robotics field, Regelous is a pioneering computer graphics software engineer from New Zealand who is best known as the creator of the Massive intelligent crowd-simulation system used in such films as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Happy Feet. Ratatouille, and more. Together, the two visionaries partnered to design an extremely intelligent robot that can view a 3D mental image of its environment to determine and control physical action and reactions.