Watch Your Ass, Angelina: the Robots are Acting

The Wakamaru is a robot originally intended for housework– which in Japan means providing weather reports and greeting guests.  We consider housework to be more mundane tasks like doing the dishes, vacuuming, fixing the garage door… but Wakamaru has his fancy little hands set on something else: acting.  For the first time in our knowledge, a robot has an active part in theater.  At the Osaka University in Japan, Wakamaru is officially an out-of-the-cooking-closet thespian.  We knew there was something funny about Wakamaru when we caught it lip syncing to Madonna records.  In the play Hataraku Watashi, this $15k Can of Fabulous has become the world’s first acting robot.  Take that, Johnny 5… [cnet]