Beyond playing host to the opening of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” at his Seattle movie theater Cinerama on Thursday, Paul Allen has other connections to the beloved sci-fi film franchise.
Across organization’s that the billionaire Microsoft co-founder has a hand in, people are working on projects that rely on cutting-edge advances in science and technology, and, as a new blog post notes, “aim to make science fiction into reality.”
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Just in time for the new Star Wars flick, Allen’s Vulcan Inc. has put together a video with Jeff Kramer, Allen’s technical advisor, exploring how close we are to a Star Wars droid reality.
Kramer is a fan of the films who happens to have an extensive background in robotics, and is able to connect what we know about beloved characters like C-3P0, R2-D2 and BB-8 with whether their abilities are evident in real-world robotics.
Can Kramer do it in 6 million forms of communication? Probably not. But his English was just fine for this exercise.
Check out the video to see how Kramer makes the connection between C-3PO and the modern humanoid robot out of Boston Dynamics, or how the “cutest of all the droids,” BB-8, is actually the most realistic.
