If you find yourself flying through D.C. with a layover at Dulles Airport of 2 hours or more, you can take a shuttle over to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Located on the Dulles grounds, it is another branch of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. Among the exhibits there is the US Space Shuttle Enterprise, and all the satellite, spacecraft, and aircraft displays you would expect. But there are a few other SciFi goodies as well, including the most complete classic ray gun collection I have ever seen, a small assortment of Robots, a phone booth in the shape of a Mercury capsule, and an R2-D2 USPS mailbox.
Roboworld is now open at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. Billed as the largest robotics exhibition in the United States, it includes robots you can play air hockey and basketball with, and a number who demonstrate the basics of robotic senses. There are also some famous Film Bots, such as C-3PO from Star Wars and Maria from Metropolis, as well as Gort, Robby, and Dewey. The Post-Gazette has a nice little video introduction to the exhibit, if you don’t mind sitting through a short commercial first. And then there is Robot Truth…
The new Transformers Movie will be hitting the big screen in 2 weeks, so I wanted to include a trailer here. This is the official US movie release trailer, but you will also want to check out the SFX link to the Japanese Premier…
Alasdair Wilkins at io9 has a very nice article about Asimov’s Robots, focusing on how obeying the Three Laws can still end up with killer robots running around loose. David Brin also put together an interesting post yesterday covering a number of different topics, including the SIGMA group, which had another gathering this past week in D.C.. Wish I had known about the book signing the authors did at Reiter’s Bookstore as part of that event ahead of time, it would have been fun to attend.
Ghost In The Shell 2.0 is not a remake of the Starwars school, but rather an updating of the original masterpiece using modern animation tools and techniques. Scene for scene, it is exactly the same movie… except it looks and sounds better. There is an excellent collection of old and new frames for comparison at Asian Blueray Guide to give you an idea of the differences between the two versions. Expect it out in the US come August or September. If you can’t wait, it will be playing at Annecy, the worlds biggest animation festival. The Festival starts June 8th and runs to the 13th, showing over 500 films from 63 countries, including 10 feature Film Official Selections including Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Redline. The 2.0 trailer…
Christine Fall did a story to make you think about the Real Robot Revolution, already in progress at a research lab near you. Just the thing to get you ready for the release of Terminator Salvation on May 21st.