Someone’s Built Pixar’s Luxo Jr. And It’s Amazing

OK, so it’s not exactly like the one we see at the beginning of Pixar films, but a real-life Luxo Jr. has been made and it looks rather awesome.

It may not be as independent as the famous bouncing Pixar lamp - for starters it can’t actually jump - but it’s the most impressive attempt at recreating the iconic desk appliance we’ve seen.

Jochen Alt is the designer behind Luci (branded Naughty Luci in the video) - the excellent lamp creation that has features such as facial recognition and trajectory planning to calculate its movements. Amazingly, the piece of kit can locate a face and base its movements on where the person is in relation to the moving lamp.

As the footage shows, it’s an impressive feat that shows it interacting with both people and objects around it. In fact, Luci is wired to hone in on a human face and maintain tracking it, whilst expressing various emotions.

It’s described in more detail at Makezine;

‘Luci scans the environment by inspecting a 3D grid until a face is detected. Luci follows the biggest face and switches into the face interaction mode. The detected face is tracked and fed into the kinematics. Luci always looks at that face regardless of other movements.

Luci can move back quickly to express surprise, shyly move towards a face, watch from various angles, move down and watch a face from below, move up and nod in agreement, etc.’

The lamp is a mixture of plastic and wooden structure, but looks convincing as a standard lamp you’d find on your desk.

The next step is to make a jumping Juxo Jr., right?

Picture credits: Pixar, Jochen Alt YouTube channel