At CES 2022, Hyundai unveiled its vision of what a future enhanced by robotics and Artificial Intelligence, and here’s what it looks like.
Having recently bought the innovative robotics design company Boston Dynamics, Hyundai is not shy about its claims of the future as far as this technology is concerned — according to the South Korean Company, we’ll see plenty of robots, artificial intelligence, and a metaverse linking the two in the not-so-distant future.
In its presentation at CES 2022, available via the embedded video above, Hyundai first showed a demonstration of how its concepts could aid human mobility, thanks to small pods that can join up with larger transit system to enable cross-city travel with great convenience.
This particular idea was based around a Plug and Drive Module that is built around a wheel but contains everything needed for braking, suspension, and other vehicular requirements. The highly adaptable design means that it can even be used on furniture to rearrange rooms quickly for different purposes — the graceful pieces “move like a figure skater”, so that the concept almost resembles a scene from Beauty and the Beast.
Related: This Boston Dynamics robot really does move like Jagger
Robots also have many uses in industrial contexts of course, but Hyundai’s vision isn’t exactly as you might have imagined it. While even in the modern day you can see Spot, Boston Dynamics’ adorable dog-like robot performing dangerous tasks such as patrolling Chernobyl and measuring radiations levels, in the future robots are predicted to perform other potentially dangerous tasks through human input, via the Metaverse. According to this idea, the robots would be physical avatars for the humans who input controls; humans will see themselves in a virtual recreation of the real environment where the robots physically undertake their task.
The Metaverse will permeate other areas of life too; the example was given of a self-driving car, where passengers could explore the surface of Mars in Virtual Reality while their vehicle is in transit, even experiencing the real-life weather effects as they happen thanks to satellite information beamed back from the red planet.
Hyundai’s ideas are ambitious and intriguing, and we can’t wait to see these plans become a reality as the world sees artificial intelligence and robotics become more and more integrated into our daily lives.
