University of Tokyo

News

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  Craving machine companionship? Japan's robot hotel is for you

  When you check into Japan's newest hotel, a mechanized velociraptor in a bellhop cap greets you at the front desk.

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  Super-stretchable smart fabrics could enable new wearables

  Engineers in Japan are making conductive inks that can be stretched to the extreme, adding to research on smart fabrics by Google, NTT and other groups in one sign of the possible future direction of wearables.

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  Skip the waiter and order with this Bluetooth mat

  If you hate waiting for restaurant servers and can't abide mistakes in your order, there's an app -- and a mat -- for that.

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  Researchers hack Sony headset to simulate autism

  Japanese researchers want to show people what it's like to have autism by using a headset that distorts imagery of people nearby.

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  Fukushima disaster spurs Japan to mass-produce its own drones

  Japan has robot chops aplenty. Honda has the world's most sophisticated humanoid robot, Japanese industrial robot makers are among the best, and the country's space agency landed a robot probe on a speeding asteroid and returned samples to Earth.

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  Nissan plans to offer affordable self-driving cars by 2020

  By 2020, Nissan will offer self-driving cars in several models created in collaboration with tech teams from the top universities, including MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tokyo.