Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

What's with this kind of "Technical Innovation" video? Synthesized voiceover, royalty-free upbeat stock music background, myriad of grammatical and factual errors, over-hypes a fairly simple device, clearly developed/produced outside of the U.S. but is targeting an English-speaking audience.

I understand the "looking for funding" aspect of this, but if you can't get simple grammatical errors fixed, or honestly, if you can't afford to higher quality voiceover talent for your promotional video, then it just makes the product seem like a scam. Its fascinating that the producers of this device and video don't realize how bad this kind of thing could make them look.

There was lot of talk of "spherical gear" in the intro to the video, but as best as I could tell, the robot itself didn't use a spherical gear at all.

I do not think this video was made by the lab that invented this. I couldn't find where they got the video clips from, but I did find a video about an earlier iteration of a cilia-based pipe robot from the same lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGJXTUZbbWA

I believe the spherical gear is used to move the "elephant head."

It's unclear to me if this is an offshoot from that university lab trying to get interest in commercialization of their tech or if it's a content mill setup looking to cash in on this obscure-ish Japanese research lab's robots.

I could believe either and the kind of production fits either to me.

These are made by bots or low paid foreign labor (and probably soon AI if not already) and spammed at places like Reddit/HN for a) karma farming to make accounts look "legit" for advertising use b) ad view revenue. It's basically the same business model as SEO-ified blogspam.

I think this is what you get when material scientists have just a few hours to produce a video, and have no knowledge of video editing software.

People watch it, so there's money to be made.

This isn't new either. There are plenty of TV channels that run 24/7 "documentaries" of similar quality.

content producer is probably not native speaker of the language? also, isn't this a trendy thing to do on TikTok?

...Where low effort content reigns supreme I guess.

I mean, they just gave you a demo on a robot that wiggles around inside of a pipe with all sorts of 3D generated content. if that's low effort content in your book...

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