Technology from Japan

No it’s not a human, It’s a virtual robot!

January 24, 2012 |

Author Jan Brekke

What!!? Ok, let us give you an update on what this is. This is a robot or computer that has the ability to speak text. We are mostly familiar with the one used for example in windows as a text-to-speech engine. I think we could all agree on that this is understandable but not very good or realistic. Yamaha has now created and designed a new engine that is called Vocaloid.

Vocaloid is a synthesizer engine that creates a singing voice that’s very clean and nice. The engine is able to set emotions and flow into the “singer” to make it sound as realistic as possible. It analyze the words/sentence and have it make sense so they fit perfectly together.

Believe it or not, the Vocaloid robot has gotten it’s own name, and music career which is rather popular. They have created it as a cute girl named “Hatsune Miku” that sings in Japanese. To make her even more alive they created her in 3d to appear on stage as a hologram that sings and dances.

(Take a look below for two of her concerts. If you jump to minute mark 3:10 on the last video you’ll notice how clear and pure the voice is.)

The best of it is that the Vocaloid software is available for you to download and use. The only thing is that you should know your way in the Japanese language because the software is written in Japanese writing. We have heard that there has been made an English version, but we haven’t been able to dig this one up. A non-official Japanese source has reported to us that this version costs around 200 US dollars, but since we haven’t found any information about this on the Vocaloid homepage we won’t make a big story about it. Should you have any information about this, please let us know.

There is a lot of good computer generated speeches out there, and they will be part of our lives in somewhere not to far in the future (some of them already are).. Another one s the one that appears on the amazing site of Qwiki. Go on and give it a try, you will be amazed!!

Posted in Entertainment, Hardware, Software, Technology from Japan |

Tags: Hatsune Miku, Japan, japanese girl, japanese technology, music, speech engine, synthisizer engine, text to speech, text2speech, virtual girl, virtual robot, vocal engine, vocaloid, yamaha |

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Sega makes sure you’ll never be bored again while urinating

January 11, 2012 |

Author Jan Brekke

We love technology that they develop in Japan. Many countries seems to be afraid of change and to try something new but NOT Japan. The entertainment company Sega was in 2011 launching a “Kill-Boredom” solution while urinating. This is mainly only available for men at the moment, but as an innovating country they are, we assume the female version ain’t that far behind.

This doesn’t come as a shock to us as Japan already already has technology built into their toilets, They are most commonly known for functions like; posterior shower jets and perfume bursts to make you smell nice. A great thing about having Sega install these short games into urinals is to trigger the competitive instinct in humans to actually try to hit that target in the porcelain bowl. This will make sure that the urine ends up in the toilet and not on the floor.

Before you start you will have the option to choose from four different games which Sega has chosen to call “The Toy-Let Games”. Each urinal is constructed with a pressure sensor, and a small screen placed at eye level that will display the game itself while you pee, and show you the results. As a bonus, it will also show you the amount of liquid you managed to squeeze out, combined with a tiny static commercial.

Have a look at the video below to see it in action..