Morgui, a robot constructed at the University of Reading has been rated so scary, he has been banned from interacting with anyone aged under 18. This disembodied stull with big blue eyes and 5 senses (visual, audio, radar, infrared and ultrasonic) is able to follow people around the room and watch how they respond to him.

“We’ve not had a robot head before,” said Prof Warwick. “It’s sort of scaryish, but in a fun way. Kids like this sort of thing. Of course, some of them we expected to be a little bit scared, others not, and we wanted to see how they responded.”

In Europe, Japan and the US, researchers have been looking for robots that will respond “naturally” to humans. It therefore follows that the robots must also study how humans respond to them.
(Guardian Unlimited article via chapel perilous)