Real Life Pixar Lamp Can’t Get Enough Of Human Interaction

This curious lamp, powered by an Arduino board and servo motors, is just as playful as the on-screen counterpart that inspired its creation.

The New Zealand Herald reports on the creation of the lamp, seen in action in the video above:

The project is a collaborative effort by Victoria University students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Gur and Joss Doggett, who met in a Physical Computing class.

The lamp’s movements are informed by a webcam with an algorithm working behind it.

Robotics and facial recognition technology enable the lamp to search for faces in the images from its webcam. When it spots a face, it follows as if trying to maintain eye contact.

“It basically behaves like a dog, sitting on your desk,” said Pinokio’s programmer and software engineer Zhou.

Lamp Responds to Human Faces [New Zealand Herald]

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