Big Hero 6 – CMU Robotics Institute | Hacker News Reader

Big Hero 6 – CMU Robotics Institute

cs.cmu.edu

69 pointsspking10 comments

I'm surprised that BH6 draws so much inspiration from CMU's efforts when the inflatable robots from Otherlab's Pneubotics are arguably many generations more-sophisticated:

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/11/21/inflatable-robots-othe...

In fact, IIRC the grad student researcher who worked on the early CMU ones did internships at Otherlab prior to doing his thesis on inflatable robots at CMU.

is there any overview on robots that were successfully by kickstarter or other crowdfunding campaigns?

I admire the core of what they're attempting here, but if you want an argument for good design impacting the ability to communicate, this is a textbook example. That page is really hard to process due to a combination of bad design and content strategy. Too many links, line widths waaaay to long making, the link color is obnoxious compounding the fact that there are more links than actual text in many of the paragraphs, terrible navigation and general layout, bad quality pics, etc...

I know the whole damn web looked like this in 1998 when I first started looking at websites in High School, but good gravy this is awful. I must be spoiled.

Oh this isn't an organizational webpage.

This is the web page of an individual (a researcher).

As another commenter said, he is focused a lot more on research than building websites ;-)

If anyone would like to help put together a nice looking version of this I could help coordinate with you.

Looks like he's almost headed in the direction of a Kickstarter, which hasn't really happened in the scientific world on a large scale yet. If some designers could volunteer, we get rolling on building a real Baymax sooner!

Yes, I get the feeling they'd rather spend their time building robots and not web pages. But hey, since they're really good at building robots, I think we probably shouldn't complain. In fact, maybe we can help them build the project as open source?

I actually love pages like this. No eye candy just information, and tons of links to branch out from.

I'd say that this page looks par for the course for the professors at my university.

It's worth keeping in mind that many of them first learned HTML in the 80s and 90s and can't be bothered to keep up with design fads on the Internet. When I see a university page that has a "modern" sense of aesthetics, it's almost certainly built by a much younger professor (that also happens to use git and bootstrap and twitter and cell phones).

Edit: On the other hand there are YouTube embeds and the link to photos and videos points to Dropbox instead of an FTP server.

> On the other hand there are YouTube embeds and the link to photos and videos points to Dropbox instead of an FTP server.

Seems to me like Atkeson chooses to keep up with the trends that actually improve a page, and not the design trends that make it easier to read. This is probably a good resource allocation for a person like a professor.

for me the BS factor goes way up with slick, slick academic websites

this style (i.e. no style) seems par for the course among CS academics

content vs style --- I prefer content

I don't know how you survived Web 1.0 with all this struggle.

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