Someone in Hong Kong has either seen the movie “Her” one too many times, or just really digs robots. In fact, we know the latter to be true. A 42-year-old product and graphic designer by the name of Ricky Ma has spent over $50,000 and a year and a half of his life developing Mark 1, a female prototype robot that looks disturbingly like Scarlett Johansson. The video below gives a brief glimpse into ScarJoBot’s functionality:
According to Mirror Online, Ma modeled the humanoid after a Hollywood star that he would not disclose (but, come on, it’s totally her) and then went as far as programming the lady bot to respond to a set of programmed verbal commands, facial expressions and all. As for how his robo-buddy was put together, roughly 70 percent of its body was created with 3D printing technology. “Additionally, I needed to build 3D models for all the parts inside the robot. Also, I had to make sure the robot’s external skin and its internal parts could fit together. When you look at everything together, it was really difficult,” Ma said.
But none of that explains why in the world a man in his early 40s would spend over a year creating a robotic celebrity to pal around with. Then again, sometimes the simplest explanations are the easiest to swallow: “When I was a child, I liked robots. Why? Because I liked watching animation. All children loved it. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots.” Ma went on to say, “After I grew up, I wanted to make one. But during this process, a lot of people would say things like, ‘Are you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? It’s really hard.'”
In the end, it sounds like the entire process was incredibly challenging, but totally worth it, with Ma making it sound like it was practically a bucket list item when stating, “I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life.” Here’s hoping the next story we write about him doesn’t involve being murdered in his sleep by a rogue cyborg.
