This could only be creepier if William Shatner, who was in Kingdom of the Spiders“, did a spoken word piece for the soundtrack. The video clip does bring that old b-movie to mind, doesn’t it? It also reminds me of those creepy reconfiguring polybots I mentioned last year (reLink). Only now I want to build one for myself.
If you like this video, be sure to check out the other videos being uploaded by robots7.
{Update: I didn’t know you could buy this thing via a kit – Link. Surprise, surprise. A bit pricey, but still…}
Weird as it may sound, I’ve always imagined ‘kirkyans’ as spider-like, mobile, and smart… gobs of them, tribes of them, breeding fast as viruses, scaling up and down in real space/time and in virtual form, just pushing up from the seams of things.
Maybe I think of the abstraction (the ‘kirkyan’) that way because I teach about web-spiders and search engines… and kirkyans have something in common with webspiders, but they run the bridge between virtual and real space.
Hmm.
I’ve never put a single form to them, but I have imagined them in a number of configurations. Obviously the military’s UCAV prototypes are already a candidate for becoming kirkyans, so those are an obvious form factor. And thoses polybots I’ve mentioned before (especially those cube-shaped ones) have been on my mind quite a bit; I tend to see them as potential kirkyans. More recently I’ve been thinking about robot subs as kirkyans because they’re an application where product evolution would happen relatively fast I’d think. Imagine a kirkyan robot sub intended to investigate thermal vents.
I actually prefer not thinking about “tribes” of them. The idea of kirkyans acting cooperatively can be especially alarming. That oil spill recovery idea could just as easily be a next generation cluster bomb.