Luxo Jr. is Pixar's lamp mascot that you can see hopping around before your movie starts, has been made into a real life object. A replica of the Pixar lamp called Pinokio and was created by three students at Victoria University of Wellington.
For Pinokio, students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Dror, and Joss Doggett brought an ordinary lamp made of steel and aluminum to life. Using six servo motors, a webcam, some Arduino, and a bit of processing Pinokio came to life.
Mocking the movements that can be seen in the beginning of Pixar's films Pinokio bulb has been replaced with a webcam that tracks the movement of people sitting nearby. When provoked, the lamp will mug, hide, investigate and even beg for attention when it is ignored.
Due to a modified microphone, it can also respond to noises. The result, of all the components behave expressively and interact with what's going on around it. The designers did not necessarily set out to create a robot or a replica of the Pixar lamp, but they did want to turn an everyday object into something that felt alive and conveyed emotion.
