It is hard to say which would be scarier: waking up to an earthquake, or to being trapped inside of a jumbo coffin-like contraption containing your bed and emergency supplies.

Wang Wenxi developed and patented this bizarre panic-room bed prototype, which drops a top and side on your snuggly shelter when disaster strikes (or, in certain variants: drops you down into a solid shell, with the lid folding over the top after your fall).

Food, water, masks and fire extinguishers are contained in the bed frame as well, and the structure itself is designed to take a beating as well as loads from above. Of course, there are a lot of criticisms one could level at this design, including: it would be difficult to move the bed inside of a home to begin with, and one could be injured by the closing operation (say you like to sleep with your feet hanging off the edge).

Then, assuming one survives, how long will the air inside last, or will you slowly suffocate your in your modern sarcophagus to be found years or centuries later by curious archeologists? If all else fails, perhaps the patent holder will find success at a different scale, designing animal traps instead of human shelters.

The post Vault 101: Freaky Earthquake-Proof Bed Locks You Inside first appeared on Gajitz.

Coffee drinkers love their morning coffee so much that it’s basically a long-term committed relationship. Korean designer Jang WooSeok compares a sip of coffee to a warm, comforting kiss. And he points out that while coffee is always available, a kiss with a loved one isn’t always possible.

He took the idea of a coffee kiss and began sketching a face-like lid for a coffee tumbler. When you put your lips to the lips on the lid, it’s a bit like kissing a warm mouth. A hole in the bottom lip dispenses sips of your favorite warm beverage, bringing you two types of comfortable happiness at once.

When Jang began work on his idea, he outfitted it only with lips, but something felt off. He added a nose and facial muscle contours to make it more lifelike and kissable. The result is a shape that is definitely human-like, but still just so very weird.

The designer sees it as a fun product that will be great marketing for businesses that use it, and we have to agree there. Everyone will want to know where you got the creepy coffee lid with a face on it. The lids are already in production and are being sold in Korea in quantities of 100 or 1000.

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It’s been said in many different ways: the only sure things in life are death and taxes. But what if you didn’t have to die? What if the death of your physical body only meant that you would go on existing in another way entirely, and that your essence would never truly leave the Earth? That’s the goal of the Terasem Movement, the group that brought us the creepy AI robot head with a real woman’s personality. Another part of their endeavors is LifeNaut, a digital storage system that allows users to back up their personalities online. But just storing your personality would be boring. LifeNaut allows you to create a digital avatar of yourself that will communicate with your friends and family after you die.

After uploading your personality and picture, your likeness is animated into a copy of you that you can converse with so that it can learn from you. Once your physical body suffers the inevitability of death, the avatar can stay behind to act as a companion to your loved ones who miss talking to you. As if the idea of having a conversation with a dead relative isn’t creepy enough, LifeNaut offers an additional service which they call BioFile. For $1 a day, the company will place some of your cells into long-term storage in that hopes that one day, science will be able to grow you a new body from them. And when your new body is complete, the personality that you uploaded can be placed into it…making death a completely avoidable adventure, after all.

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Understanding how babies develop is an important part of understanding how the human brain works. The quest to explore the development of children led researchers at the University of California, San Diego to build this utterly terrifying baby robot. In cooperation with Japanese robotics firm Kokoro Co., Ltd., the team constructed this rather complicated machine that is meant to mimic the actions of a one-year-old human child. Unfortunately, they decided to give it a creepy rubber face and no skin on the rest of its body, so it looks much more like a nightmare than a child.

The robot, named Diego-san, has over 60 moving parts in its body. Its five-fingered hands are able to grasp objects, and the robot can even stand up from a sitting (in a chair) position. The head contains more than 20 moving parts that allow Diego-san to create facial expressions. The head also contains high-res cameras in the eyes, a speaker in the mouth, and accelerometers in the ears that detect the robot’s movement and position.

In addition to helping researchers understand how babies acquire motor skills in the first year of life, Diego-san will impart important clues about how babies learn various facial expressions and interact with their immediate environment. While all of this research will undoubtedly lead to some important discoveries, we can’t help but think that one day, this thing will have a massive fit and destroy the lab and everyone in it. Godspeed, you foolish, foolish researchers.

The post Wanna Play? Humanoid ‘Bot Baby Teaches While it Learns first appeared on Gajitz.

Some people enjoy being frightened. We watch scary movies, visit haunted houses and ride roller coasters, all for a thrill. But those are nothing compared to the mind-bending horror of these three animatronic singing heads. If you don’t feel at least a tinge of heart-stopping terror while watching their lifeless eyes roll and their rubbery lips move, then you just might be a creepy robot yourself.

The trio of heads was made by artist Nathaniel Mellor and was on display at Art Basel Miami 2009. The movements are controlled by servos and an attached computer. The robots’ shocking price tag – $75,000 – makes us wonder about the sanity of some people, but no more than the mere existence of the robots themselves does.

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