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Funktionide Blob: A Video Love Story
Funktionide is a robotic blob made of electroactive polymers which provide the movement; it is an emotional robot that can cure lonely, disconnected people by providing them with the loving, non-judgemental contact that everyone needs.
See if you still believe all that stuff after looking at the video below.
(Funktionide blob cures loneliness video)
I really have to disagree with Funktionide creator Stefan Ulrich; a blob that crawls into bed with you is really not going to make me relax.
However, I gamely took my best shot at trying to think of a blob that was presented in a positive light in science fiction, which as a genre seems to mostly warn us about the danger posed by blobs.
Anyway, the only positively presented blob that I can recall is the Pinkness from Clifford Simak's excellent 1961 novel Time is the Simplest Thing. It is described as a... well, room-sized blob that is able to communicate telepathically with human beings.
Far away he saw the life - the thing that sprawled limply on the floor... it was pink: an exciting pink... the kind of pink the little girl next door might wear at her seventh birthday party.It was aware of him. And it was not afraid.
It was a fairly massive thing, twelve feet high or so in the middle of it, and it sprawled across an area twenty feet or more in diameter... It was just a lump.
Then he sensed the flutter... the flutter of the being that sprawled pinkly on the floor - the flutter of a thought half-formed, the beginning of communication...
And the creature spoke.
"Hi, pal," it said. "I trade with you my mind."
When you think about it, the Funktionide blob is really a kind of soft-bodied robot; in which vein, consider the Walking Gel Caterpillar Like The Blob! and the Gummi Bots: Biomimetic Soft-Bodied Robots .
Via dvice.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/6/2009)
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