Take four glam department-store dummies from a bankruptcy sale. Add four licensed Marvel super-heroine costumes from a fancy dress shop. Sell on eBay for a fortune, to unsuspecting goofy-geeks who might think the dummies are RealDolls…

MarketWire reports that U.S. firm True Companion will er… unleash “the first female sex robot” at the Adult Entertainment Expo at the Sands Convention Center, early Jan 2010.

“an artificial intelligence robot which was been specifically engineered to completely gratify the owner [ ... and which ] can carry on a conversation”

She’ll be chatting away in booth #7031, apparently. Although the marketing material doesn’t seem to emphasise her conversational skills. Hmmm, perhaps it needs the addition of a speech bubble…

A nice new haul o’ links, courtesy of DC:—

MIT’s Technology Review blog has a short post on the problems of Making Realistic Skin for Robots. If that interests, follow it up with Bill Christensen’s September 2009 musings on The Challenge of Making Real ‘Surrogate’ Skin.

And the International Journal of Social Robotics appears to be free and open-access, despite being hosted on the site of commercial publisher Springerlink.com. It has full-text PDFs from great names such as H.Ishiguro and David Levy.

Crunchgear spots and translates a Japanese report, that department stores in Japan are offering life-sized robots that look like their owners…

“The robots will go on sale for $225,000 each. They’ll be manufactured by Kokoro”

Are artificial wives on the horizon? muses The Washington Post. The IEET runs a poll on the ethics of such developments.

The Diet Newsletter, a monthly magazine on visual art in Florida, has a long and detailed conversation with Amber Hawk Swanson about her RealDoll relationship….

“All the time I was waiting for her, I was so excited to strap on and have her strap on and I was imagining all the things that would be possible. I was intent to enjoy Amber Doll separate from any project. The whole time I was waiting, people would ask me how I planned to get sexual pleasure from this doll. Female RealDolls are created for sex with men, but for me getting off with the doll felt really possible.”

Alex Sandwell Kliszynski (Cambridge School Of Art) at Saatchi Online. He uses Photoshop to remove genitalia, hair, etc — and then adds joints to make real people look like dolls…

Christened Vocaloid by the press, it answers to HRP-4C to its friends…

Part of Yamaha’s “Play iT” tech demo, Oct 2009.

Crafthouse is selling $600 robot hands to hobbyists.

A videogame joystick that fits between your legs and pumps up and down and rocks from side to side. Yes, I know what you’re thinking…

Nintendo have just patented a thrusting tilting “horse-riding” device that connects to the Wii.