Humanoid robot Sophia, which was created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, sold a self-portrait of itself for just under US$700,000. The digital artwork was sold via crypto art platform Nifty Gateway and is the first instance of NFT (non-fungible tokens) art created by artificial intelligence (AI) being sold.
Sophia was first presented in 2016 by the Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics and has been seen at various conferences in recent years. The robot is modeled on a human and tries, among other things, to imitate facial expressions when speaking. In late 2017, Sophia became the first robot to be granted citizenship rights when Saudi Arabia declared the robot an official citizen.
Now, Sophia has entered the NFT fray with a digital self-portrait recently selling at auction for US$688,888. The artwork – named Sophia Instantiation – is a joint effort by an Italian digital artist Andrea Bonaceto, the robot Sophia and the team of engineers, software developers, and artists from Hanson Robotics. The final artwork takes the form of a 12-second MP4 file that shows the transformation of Bonaceto’s painting into a digital painting.
The digital artwork was purchased by an anonymous NFT collector, only known by the Twitter handle “Crypto888crypto.”
Hanson Robotics has also announced a new partnership with Immervision, the Montreal-based computer vision company. Immervision has developed JOYCE, the first humanoid robot developed by the computer vision community to help machines gain human-like perception and beyond.
Under the new partnership between the two companies, the Sophia robot will work with Immervision’s JOYCE to further evolve machine perception to help deliver human-like vision and beyond. Hanson Robotics will use its expertise gleaned from Sophia to create a state-of-the-art humanoid body for JOYCE. This body will be equipped with a visual cortex based on Immervision’s panomorphEYE, which boasts three ultra-wide-angle panomorph cameras. Sophia will also be upgraded with the same visual cortex.
“We are very excited to be partnering with Immervision on the JOYCE project,” said David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics. “I believe that strong computer vision like Immervision’s products, combined with embodied cognition of a social robot like Sophia and her little sister JOYCE, will produce in huge leaps forward in useful AI and robotics.”
