With the latest drop from MSCHF, you can control the Boston Dynamics robot with a paintball gun on your back

At least one future is here now. Prankster arts / marketing collective MSCHF recently spent $ 74,500 to buy Spot Robo-Dog from Boston Dynamics. He has a Tippmann 98 paintball gun on his back and is Allows people around the world to remotely control the bot through their phones in an art gallery Filled with his work for two minutes at a time. MSCHF is calling it Spot stampede, And the event is taking place on February 24 at 1 pm ET. Latest Declaration of the Kvath MSCHF:

When the killer robots arrive in America, they are wrapped in fur, carrying a ball. The spot is Rob Rhinehart’s ideal pet: it never moves.

Good Boy, Spot! Everyone in this world keeps an eye on the cute little spot and knows: This thing will definitely be used by the police and military to kill people. And what does the police department have? Strong associations! Spot is the employee of the month. You do not need a union to bust a robot – but a robot can bust you.

right! Boston Dynamics No fan. MSCHF says the company offered it one and two spot robots for free because it hated the idea. Naturally, there is a tweet.

Feeling resentful, doesn’t it? It protested a lot, as it were. In the past few years, news reports that the police department is testing these terrifying robot dogs to see if they are useful in the field. This is to say: If your company is going to get funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a robot, don’t be surprised if people see potential nefarious uses for the things that make it.

Anyway, controlling the spot is a lot of fun. I got to test the robot / paintball gun combo the other day, and I must say that I, everyone who has tested it, suddenly understood what it looked like to be a drone pilot. Although it does not do much. MSCHF Swiss Army Knife Daniel Greenberg says, “We learned shortly after we got it: Everything you’ve seen in those videos of Boston Dynamics is not really what you once actually had.” “It doesn’t really do anything other than walk, to be completely honest.”

Still, the MSCHF people agree that it is terrible to see Spot walking around with a gun on his back. “Five years from now, it feels like I can roam Brooklyn and see one of these things like a taser,” says Greenberg. “Who knows what the future holds?” (And yes, the group tested their spots on the Brooklyn sidewalk, people kept staring.)

Although apparently it is quite difficult to get a gun in New York where MSCHF is based – and yes, including paintball guns. One of the engineers working on the project explains: You can’t buy a paintball gun on Amazon in NYC. The team ended up going to a combo scuba diving / paintball store to find guns and ammunition.

Picture: MSCHF

The incident is only a matter of time. “There is no waitlist.” There is no payment. Greenberg says there is no further data collection from the site. “And it’s going to change drivers every two minutes. If you are on site, and you are lucky, you are very good. If not, this is what it is. ”

When I was controlling the spot, it felt almost the same as playing video games on a controller with two analog sticks. There were some gaps, which were not very difficult to compensate. If you’ve played a game on a controller because Sony introduced its DualShock controller, the MSCHF’s UI will feel very familiar. It is also familiar that Spot comes with an end user license agreement.

“There is a danger that Boston Dynamics may shut it down,” says programmer Matthew Rayfield. “Based on some documentation and policies, you have to sign and get it to use it, it seems that there are certain uses, including violent types of stuff, that they don’t want to use,” he continues. is. “And it seems to read that they have a kill switch that they can just flip.”

The MSCHF team has been working on this drop since October when they got their hands on the bot. Programming it is obviously quite user friendly. Boston Dynamics summarizes it enough that Rayfield says the hardest part was getting the paintball gun to work reliably.

My run ended after 10 minutes, when the robot collapsed on the gallery floor. (It was slippery with paint from previous drivers.) The robot, he said, was stuck; It cannot be regained without human assistance.