Gizmodo is featuring a new robotic mannequin that poses for shoppers. Cool! The mannequin takes pictures of the shoppers to collect demographic and other information about shoppers. Not cool! Time to apply those lessons from Minority Report and get yourselves some new eyes.

Japan will be employing robotic information booth workers at the upcoming World Expo. The robots will understand 40,000 phrases covering four different languages. What’s the problem with putting a human face on something with less than average human intelligence? It makes the robot appear retarded.

Hack-a-day has a write up for building your own creepy movement tracking robot (which will also statisfy your stuffed animal surgery craving). The comments provide links to other peoples BEAM bots.