Saturday 3 October 2009

The Gadget Show 'Flash Forward Special'

In this weeks Gadget Show (Series 12, Episode 9), which you can at the time of writing watch here, was a 'Flash Forward Special' concentrating on "seeking out gadgets that will be commonplace in the near future". Ignoring the blatant plug of a new Channel 5 Series, the most interesting part for me was Jon Bentley's piece on humanoid robots and those that attempt to emulate human thought. Firstly amongst the laptops in the Turing I'm sure some of them are running Linux but I couldn't get a good screenshot. However during bentley's visit to Plymouth University there's the iCub, a robot toddler that moves and learns like a human. The Dell laptop that runs the thing clearly shows a Gnome desktop. It looks like the Debian default theme, so I guess that's what it runs.

Dell Laptop running Linux










Close-up shot of 'icubsrv'










Close-up shot 2










The iCub