As visitors walk into Dubai’s Museum of the Future, they are greeted with a joke and a smile by an unlikely staff member – ‘Ameca’, the humanoid robot.
Manufactured by a company called Engineered Arts, the robot boasts a human-like face and body, can track movement in the room and has facial-recognition technology. ‘Ameca’ can also interact with visitors, answering their questions about the museum.
“This robot is very unique in its stance because it uses artificial intelligence in way of understanding people’s questions and responding to them…. The way it tracks the person, the way it looks at it is very unique and very special and we’re very very very excited to have “Ameca” with us here today,” said deputy executive director of the Museum of the Future, Majed Al-Mansoori.
Visitors to the museum gathered around the robot in awe, asking questions and laughing at jokes cracked by the machine.
“It’s amazing, you know when you ask a question, she answers me in the eye, I say ‘you are so cute’, and she says ‘you are pretty too’, so you know it’s kind of magic”
visitor Alexandre Houtteville
Dubai’s Museum of the Future, a striking seven-story building inaugurated earlier this year, stands at 77 meters tall.
Its stainless-steel exterior is covered with quotes in Arabic calligraphy, including ‘the future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it’.
The museum’s futuristic exhibits project what life will be like after half a century, with the aim of projecting optimism for the future and exploring the limits of what technology can achieve.
