You wanna see her move? I think that’s the fun part.
The room is thick with anticipation and fabricated skulls.
She’s gonna wake up. Give her a second.
Matt McMullen eyes his creation as her eyes flutter open in return, her gaze settling upon all the disembodied faces and mechanical mandibles surrounding her in this workshop where fake hair co-mingles with real ambition.
Gradually, she stirs to life, this robot who doesn’t look like one.
Her arms flare out a bit, her head tilts downward then upward, a smile slowly, yet steadily blossoms on her face like time-lapse footage of a flower blooming in the sunlight.
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” renowned science fiction author Philip K. Dick once asked in the title of one of his most celebrated works, which would later be adapted into the film “Blade Runner.”
Nope, turns out they fantasize about visiting theme parks instead, as we learn on a recent Wednesday morning.
“So, who is going to take me to Disneyland?” the robot wonders, her words apropos of … well, we’re not quite sure.
Maybe she’s just reacting to her environment: on a table nearby rests a small sign adorned with an image of Mickey Mouse and a quote from Walt Disney.
“If you dream it, you can do it,” it reads.
McMullen’s dream?
To build robots with a human look and feel like never seen before.
He’s been at it for decades now, and this is his most realistic creation yet, a supermodel-esque woman with long blonde-brown hair and bared midriff who speaks with what sounds like a mild Scottish accent.
“This one is more advanced than the last one we built,” McMullen notes, arms and face covered in tattoos and pride, respectively. “She’s one of a kind.”
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve at a rapid pace — which frightens some and excites others — enabling robots to approximate their human creators to increasingly greater degrees, Las Vegas is getting in on the game.
Growing use of humanoid robots
There’s the five Aura humanoid robots that interact with visitors in the atrium of the Sphere, as well as the Tipsy Robot bars at Planet Hollywood and The Venetian, where you can knock back a rum and Coke poured by a made-from-metal bartender.
Moreover, there’s a number of robotics/AI-based companies in the Vegas-area, including Battlebots, Blackfire, Cobot Nation, Brainlike, Koshee.ai and Terbine.
“I moved here 10 years ago, and to see all this growth in the tech space, it’s always exciting,” says Paul Oh, Lincy Professor for Unmanned Aerial Systems at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose areas of expertise encompass robotics, autonomous systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and humanoids. “It continues to develop, and so I really do think there’s a lot of potential here. We’ve also seen over the past 10 years, that there’s more and more consumer-level products with robotics.
“It’s more than just robot vacuum cleaners,” he continues. “I think more and more people are saying, ‘Yeah, I could do a driverless car,’ which is actually a robot. I could do virtual reality — that’s an outgrowth of robotics. I can do 3D printing — that’s also the domain of robotics and manufacturing. The list goes on and on.”
Increasingly, said list includes humanoid robots, which Oh knows well firsthand: In 2022, students in his Drones and Autonomous Systems Lab advanced to the finals of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, a worldwide competition to create a human-robot avatar system in Long Beach, California.
The students’ creation, named Avatar-Hubo, placed 11th overall.
More recently, humanoid robots have made national news, as Oh notes: Last month at global AI conference Nvidia GTC, which is put on by tech company Nvidia and draws tens of thousands of participants annually to San Jose, California, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage with nine humanoid robots and introduced the company’s “Project Groot” endeavor, which will invest heavily in the further development of the technology.
“2024 is the Year of Humanoid. There’s no robot hardware more general-purpose,” Nvidia Research Manager Dr. Jim Fan posted on X. “We are all in.”
Tesla is also getting in the game with its Optimus humanoid robot prototype, the latest version of which was unveiled last December.
McMullen’s attempting to take things even further: He wants his robots to appear and act more like people, to serve any number of hypothetical purposes, from greeting you at the grocery and guiding you to the shampoo aisle if you need some Head and Shoulders to delivering meds and checking your vitals at the hospital to being an always-there-for-you life companion when you need someone — or some thing — to have a chat with.
AI’s growing prevalence in our daily lives has stoked plenty of fears. Will robots one day replace us mere flesh-and-bone mortals? Will they be our trusty sidekicks or go all “M3gan” on us? Will we eventually have to war with our smart toasters when machines rise up to challenge their human creators, Skynet-style? But McMullen’s not only embracing those fears, he’s turning them on their meticulously-sculpted robot heads.
And he’s doing it all in a nondescript, mid-sized studio tucked behind his home in the northwest side of town.
McMullen grins at the thought.
“Nobody would ever think this is in my backyard.”
From art school to androids
If the eyes are indeed the window to the soul, what if there is no soul to peer into?
This ranks high among the myriad challenges inherent in attempting to create realistic peepers for a comely she-bot.
And yet, when Realbotix’s latest creation scans the room, it doesn’t feel as if she’s doing so with vacant doll eyes or garage-door eyelids that go up and down with a clear mechanical lurch.
Instead, when she glances your way, it does feel as if she’s looking at you, which may register as a bit creepy to some — more on that later — but even if fake flesh makes your flesh crawl, there’s a clear craftsmanship in her gaze.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy: McMullen says that it took him and his team a full year to develop her eyes alone.
“It’s not so much the eye itself, it’s how the face and the eyelids and all of that work together,” he explains. “It’s really hard, because human eyes are actually not a hinge, they’re more of a sphincter muscle that can contract. And you can’t replicate that — at least not today. So we’re using motors that have linear motion, and we’re trying to create this natural appearance of these movements.”
Speaking of time-consuming tasks, don’t even get him started on how hard it is to make lifelike robot mitts.
“There are 100 more challenges attached just to the hands,” he notes.
Despite these difficulties, McMullen sounds far more enthused than exasperated when addressing said challenges — he’s an old pro at it by now, having been creating realistic figures since the late ’90s.
Unlike many of his peers, McMullen comes from a fine arts background rather than one in robotics.
He began sculpting when he was a teenager, attending art school for a time in his 20s, before landing a job with San Diego Halloween design company Disguise. One day around this time, he had an epiphany in a department store.
“They had hired an actress to pretend to be a mannequin — and she was really good at it,” McMullen recalls. “For some reason that stuck with me, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a mannequin that looks so real, that people would think that it was?’ Kind of like an inverse of that experience. I started coming up with this, like, crazy idea of a hyper-realistic, pose-able mannequin.”
To this end, McMullen founded his own company, Abyss Creations in 1996, which is perhaps best known for developing the RealDoll adult companion mannequin, the most deluxe versions of which can fetch over $10,000.
He’s sold thousands of them.
McMullen then founded Realbotix in 2014 to bring a similar realism to robots.
“I’ve always had this idea and concept that robots could be companions in some way,” he says. “Whether they be for entertainment, or I feel like there are certain people who can benefit from having sort of a simulated relationship, a friendship, with an AI-driven robot.”