A day out on the town with robots - Photopost
Today I decided not to stand outside in the cold in Chiba for the Marines expo, and instead went to hang out with ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
teravell, who is in town for the weekend. Due to my retarded timing last time I went to Nagoya, this was our first time meeting. Laura is another GEOS teacher who is also originally from PA and is really cool. (It's been a LONG time since I had a conversation with the phrase "Whoa, you also went to Knoebels?")
We had a lot of fun wandering around Tokyo for the day; we went to the Science Museum in Ueno to see the Robots exhibit, the Tokyo Dome ferris wheel to ride it, and Ueno again for food and karaoke. Now my throat is all sore but that's okay.
My student had given me free passes to the Robots exhibit. We got to the museum around 2:30ish and a gate guy told us in pretty good English that there was no wait for the museum or the exhibit but the Asimo show might have a 60-minute wait. So we went into the museum anyway.
Many robot toys in the exhibit.
A robotic piano. It actually sounded really good.
Grad students from a university in Kyushu demo their balancing two-leg robot.
Another professor from the Kyushu HCI lab, Shunsuke Nakamura, not to be confused with the famous soccer player. I thought it was funny how the guy who oversaw the balance robot project was older and in a suit, whereas this guy looked like a hippie and was overseeing a vision-based robotics project -- a camera would film people and react to them by making sounds or overlays on a videoscreen. It included an interpretive dance segment where the human dancer was actually controlling the music by his movements and it was adapting to him. Pretty funky.
Another shot of the balancing robot.
Yay, an Aibo!
Uh, this is supposed to be a ballroom dancing partner robot. VERY weird.
Laura shakes hands with another robot.
Another robot plays the keyboards (but looks scary).
Asimo says "Yo, wussup?"
Asimo delivers tea to the table during the demo. As it turns out, we were able to see the demo without a problem -- we just went downstairs and were ushered into the theater space. Asimo is cool and can do all kinds of crazy things and at the same time is horrendously cute to boot. I want one.
After the robots we went into the rest of the science museum. Last time I was there with Shinsuke we saw the history section of the museum; this time with Laura I did the science museum part, so we saw an upstairs area that totally reminded me of the Franklin Institute... and a downstairs area with tons of dinosaur bones.
Laura uses the magic of pulleys to lift herself off the ground.
Big sciencey room.
This is kind of like a dinosaur too.
After the museum we got chocolate-covered bananas from a stand near the station. Yum! We decided to head to the Tokyo Dome after that. I stopped at Yamashita and they had no Japan Series books. I did get some Nostalgic Baseball card packs though.
Then we rode the ferris wheel!!! This ferris wheel has no middle, just an outside ring, and a rollercoaster even goes through it. We didn't figure out how the wheel worked until we were at the top and we could see the track. The seats move on a track rather than a wheel spinning, it's odd.
Ferris Wheel.
Tokyo Dome from the top of the wheel.
Me!
Laura!
After that we went back to Ueno to find dinner. It was actually amazingly difficult to find a yakiniku place. I should have just taken Laura to Nippori, maybe. Oh well, I'm a dork that way.
We saw this Colonel Sanders outside a restaurant in Ueno's Ameyokocho.
This is the display outside the place we actually got dinner at. Pretty funny. The place itself was kind of expensive, but the food was tasty, so I'm not unhappy about it.
After all that, we went to karaoke.
They never actually gave us a book of the English song catalog, and so it was funny because apparently Laura usually doesn't get to sing in Japanese much since her friends down in Gifu don't know Japanese and just get bored. Whereas I pretty much refuse to sing in English. So, we sang in Japanese the whole time. We don't have that much overlap in music tastes but I think we did okay overall and when all else failed there was SMAP or L'arc en Ciel to the rescue. Only thing is, now my throat HURTS A LOT. Argh.
Also,firearmofmutiny would be proud of me, I sang the Fighters sanka AND I also sang Moeyo Dragons 2004, AND Laura sang along because she's heard it ninety billion times in Masa 21, BUT I only did the first 2-3 verses before my head exploded. 3-ban Tatsunami timely, 4-ban Fukudome homerun...
After two hours of karaoke it was 11:30pm so I went to catch a train home and Laura went off to Kitasenju or somewhere like that to find a place to stay.
It's REALLY COLD IN HERE. Argh.
teravell, who is in town for the weekend. Due to my retarded timing last time I went to Nagoya, this was our first time meeting. Laura is another GEOS teacher who is also originally from PA and is really cool. (It's been a LONG time since I had a conversation with the phrase "Whoa, you also went to Knoebels?")We had a lot of fun wandering around Tokyo for the day; we went to the Science Museum in Ueno to see the Robots exhibit, the Tokyo Dome ferris wheel to ride it, and Ueno again for food and karaoke. Now my throat is all sore but that's okay.
My student had given me free passes to the Robots exhibit. We got to the museum around 2:30ish and a gate guy told us in pretty good English that there was no wait for the museum or the exhibit but the Asimo show might have a 60-minute wait. So we went into the museum anyway.
Many robot toys in the exhibit.
A robotic piano. It actually sounded really good.
Grad students from a university in Kyushu demo their balancing two-leg robot.
Another professor from the Kyushu HCI lab, Shunsuke Nakamura, not to be confused with the famous soccer player. I thought it was funny how the guy who oversaw the balance robot project was older and in a suit, whereas this guy looked like a hippie and was overseeing a vision-based robotics project -- a camera would film people and react to them by making sounds or overlays on a videoscreen. It included an interpretive dance segment where the human dancer was actually controlling the music by his movements and it was adapting to him. Pretty funky.
Another shot of the balancing robot.
Yay, an Aibo!
Uh, this is supposed to be a ballroom dancing partner robot. VERY weird.
Laura shakes hands with another robot.
Another robot plays the keyboards (but looks scary).
Asimo says "Yo, wussup?"
Asimo delivers tea to the table during the demo. As it turns out, we were able to see the demo without a problem -- we just went downstairs and were ushered into the theater space. Asimo is cool and can do all kinds of crazy things and at the same time is horrendously cute to boot. I want one.
After the robots we went into the rest of the science museum. Last time I was there with Shinsuke we saw the history section of the museum; this time with Laura I did the science museum part, so we saw an upstairs area that totally reminded me of the Franklin Institute... and a downstairs area with tons of dinosaur bones.
Laura uses the magic of pulleys to lift herself off the ground.
Big sciencey room.
This is kind of like a dinosaur too.
After the museum we got chocolate-covered bananas from a stand near the station. Yum! We decided to head to the Tokyo Dome after that. I stopped at Yamashita and they had no Japan Series books. I did get some Nostalgic Baseball card packs though.
Then we rode the ferris wheel!!! This ferris wheel has no middle, just an outside ring, and a rollercoaster even goes through it. We didn't figure out how the wheel worked until we were at the top and we could see the track. The seats move on a track rather than a wheel spinning, it's odd.
Ferris Wheel.
Tokyo Dome from the top of the wheel.
Me!
Laura!
After that we went back to Ueno to find dinner. It was actually amazingly difficult to find a yakiniku place. I should have just taken Laura to Nippori, maybe. Oh well, I'm a dork that way.
We saw this Colonel Sanders outside a restaurant in Ueno's Ameyokocho.
This is the display outside the place we actually got dinner at. Pretty funny. The place itself was kind of expensive, but the food was tasty, so I'm not unhappy about it.
After all that, we went to karaoke.
They never actually gave us a book of the English song catalog, and so it was funny because apparently Laura usually doesn't get to sing in Japanese much since her friends down in Gifu don't know Japanese and just get bored. Whereas I pretty much refuse to sing in English. So, we sang in Japanese the whole time. We don't have that much overlap in music tastes but I think we did okay overall and when all else failed there was SMAP or L'arc en Ciel to the rescue. Only thing is, now my throat HURTS A LOT. Argh.
Also,
firearmofmutiny would be proud of me, I sang the Fighters sanka AND I also sang Moeyo Dragons 2004, AND Laura sang along because she's heard it ninety billion times in Masa 21, BUT I only did the first 2-3 verses before my head exploded. 3-ban Tatsunami timely, 4-ban Fukudome homerun...After two hours of karaoke it was 11:30pm so I went to catch a train home and Laura went off to Kitasenju or somewhere like that to find a place to stay.
It's REALLY COLD IN HERE. Argh.