The document describes several projects and inventions by Ramaprasanna, including BuddyHome which involved creating robots to take care of household tasks, hacking Gmail Motion after Google's April Fools joke to make it a reality, using Kinect to allow a skeleton to dance with Aishwarya Rai as seen in a movie, and creating an intelligent conversational robot named TINA that can understand speech in 7 languages and control smart home devices. It also mentions projects like creating a service to send news alerts via SMS for free and developing a natural disaster alert system after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
2. On BuddyHome
BuddyHome is my favorite out of all. With few
of my friends, I made a set of Robots to take
care of my home and me. There were Robots
for Cooking, Cleaning, waking me up. One of
the walls at home is my computer screen and
I used to interact with my computer through
gestures.
To know more on BuddyHome check out this
video http://youtu.be/ncwTJ7A59dw
3. When Google announced
‘Gmail Motion’ – a April fool
prank, I was working on
Kinect at Microsoft. Given my
background, I felt it was very
much possible to bring it to
reality. With 60 lines of
code, with 2 hrs of coding I
made that April fool prank a
reality. I also made it work on
Windows Live mail. It was
fun…
http://youtu.be/cors0076A7A
Gmail (loose)Motion (a jab at Google’s April fool
idea when I was at Microsoft)
4. It was in a movie called
‘Jeans’, Aishwarya Rai dances
with a Skeleton. I was a school
boy at that time. I made it a
reality after 10 years at my own
home with my own laptop &
Kinect. It was loads of fun.
http://youtu.be/Gdp7-mmNX-Q
My Kinect Hack –
5. TINA
TINA stands for The Intelligent Next-
generation Agent. My wife still doubts if that
was a real acronym or a girl’s name. I did
this project at WIPRO. It was the vision of
Sree at WIPRO, to have robots in Hospitality
& Retail space. TINA can speak 7 different
languages, See, hear people. It can change
TV channels, set heater temparature, control
lights, fans, drapes, etc. When instructed it
can connect people to 911 on emergency &
give you medicines. It was loads of fun
building it.
7. It’s a simple hack, where I took
out the OEM system and replaced
it with Windows Media
center, connected to
Internet, Night vision
camera, Video & Audio
processing with the night
vision, etc…
http://youtu.be/ktdXwtZYDyc
On Winfotain = Windows + Information
+ Entertainment System
8. Mr. Astrobot
This was a fun project that I did along with a
bunch of college kids. It was deployed at
Microsoft Signature building, 4th floor for a
brief amount of time. When you are
thirsty, you can open a webpage and ‘click’
on ‘Get me Water’ & this robot will bring
water to your desk.
It was loads of fun !!
http://youtu.be/3LY8wWyuEng
9. ‘Microsoft Sam’
It was fun. I was fascinated by the
movie ‘Surrogate’ and decided to do
build one myself. This Robot that
you see on right was my surrogate. I
can talk through it, I can see through
it & can connect to it. I left this at
office one day, went
home, connected to it & was
roaming in Microsoft cafeteria
talking to people. The best was
when I asked a girl, ‘howz Roti’
when she was eating ‘Roti’ and she
went crazy. <actually scared>.
I also went around knocking at few
Director’s rooms & it was loads of
fun.
10. On ‘News Nuts’
A free service that I created when I was a
student to send News alerts as SMS to
subscribers. This was when SMS was paid
and cellphones was an expensive affair. I
used a simple hack to send mass SMS for
FREE via carriers. Yuppie, via the same
carriers who charge for SMSes.
11. On DAS
When Tsunami attacked TamilNadu,
India, the very same beach were I
used to play beach football with my
cousin was turned upside down. I
was a student that time, with a small
pocket money. Instead of donating
money, I jumped into to create a
software system to predict Natural
Disasters and alert people. Most of
the data were from USGS. I won’t
say it’s a perfect system, but it
worked.
Engineers should think on how to
make the world a better place using
their talent. That’s what engineers
do !!
20. On my dancing Robots
It was boring one Sunday & my friends and
me were all set to have fun. We created a
dancing Robot which can dance for pre-set
tunes esp ‘Humma Hummma’ by AR
Rahman.