JapanSauce: Japan’s Cute Barricades

Japan’s Cute Barricades
May 24, 2016

Japan is known for having many cute and cool things, but I was still surprised to learn that Japanese construction sites are now being guarded by Hello Kitty.

Click through to the main article to see lots of other cute Japanese safety barriers.

MOMA acquires original set of emoji

Emojis are now being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, this is how it all began in 1999
27 Oct 2016, 05:11, by Milen Y

The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita, who was at the time working on a mobile internet platform, called i-mode, at Japanese carrier NTT. Kurita was inspired by the way weather forecasts and street signs used simple, but universally recognizable, symbols to convey meaning, and decided to adopt this approach for his project. The first set of emoji was comprised of just 176 pictograms, each with resolution of 12 x 12 pixels, and was aimed to differentiate i-mode's messaging features from other such services.

A fascinating bit of history. Many different news outlets have written different stories about this event, each telling something else interesting about the history of emoji:

• Guardian: Emojis before the smiling poop: New York museum acquires world's first set
• PhoneArena: Emojis are now being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, this is how it all began in 1999
• Wall Street Journal: New Faces, a Show of Hands and the Evolution of Emoji
• Something to smiley about: MoMA has just added the original set of emojis to its collection

Enjoy.

In Japan, everybody will be getting robots....

I just read an interesting article about a recent demonstration of two very human-like robots at the Tokyo museum.

Kodomoroid and Otonaroid are female-looking robots with surprisingly convincing personalities. They don't walk and have some bugs (not surprising with tech this cutting-edge), but the result is very impressive.

The article also described, but didn't show a photo of Telenoid. Telenoid appears to be more of an experiment - it is designed to be only minimally humanoid, with a face that could be male or female, and small enough (and soft enough) to be huggable. Telenoid is primarily (I think) meant to be remotely operated as a telepresence device, not an actual independent robot.

The article also makes reference to Pepper a three-wheeled robot designed to read human emotion from tone of voice and facial expressions, and respond appropriately. Pepper was developed by Softbank (one of the biggest Japanese telecom companies) and will likely start selling for under ¥200,000 ($2,000). At that price, if the product works as advertised, I think we'll start seeing a lot of people buying them.

Now if they can develop one that will clean the house for me, it will be perfect.

The self-peeling potato

The Japanese seem to have a miracle solution for everything, including a clean and easy way to peel a potato:

Breaking matza in half - the Japanese way

I posted this last year to my LJ, but what the heck..