Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Watch more than 1,000 robots dance their way to a world record

By
Massive robot dance - Guinness World Records
Someone in China recently had an idea to attempt a world record for the most robots dancing simultaneously. If you think that’s an odd thing to try, then bear in mind that Guinness World Records also has listings for the heaviest weight lifted with an eye socket (16.2 kg), the fastest 100-hundred-meter-hurdle run
Recommended Videos
wearing fins (14.82 seconds), and the most nails hammered with the human head in two minutes (38). Best you don’t try that last one at home. Or anywhere, for that matter.

The dancing robot record seems tame in comparison, but Guangzhou-based WL Intelligent Tech clearly felt it would be an excellent way to bring some attention to its “Dobi” humanoid robot. And the company was absolutely right.

On a large plaza in the city last week, company staff diligently set up more than one thousand of the 18-inch robots to attempt the dancing record.

You’ll be pleased to know that the team achieved the feat, with a total of 1,069 Dobi robots strutting their stuff in sync with one another, and as a consequence delighting the Guinness World Record officials who had traveled to Guangzhou to verify the effort.

If you’re wondering why the company didn’t round off the number of robots to 1,100, the answer is they did, but 31 of them toppled over while attempting to pull some of the trickier dance moves, disqualifying them from the final count.

Dancing robots is evidently a thing in China, as the last record for the same feat was held by another Chinese outfit, Ever Win Company, with a total of 1,007 robots (explaining why WL Intelligent Tech didn’t round it down to 1,000).

Currently aimed at the Chinese market, voice-controlled Dobi retails for around $250. It’s clearly a versatile contraption, with the multi-jointed robot able to quickly get on its own two feet from a prone position.

The android’s battery keeps Dobi going for about 40 minutes, and you’ll know when the juice is running low because its eyes will turn from blue to red.

You can command Dobi to turn left or right, or tell a story (in Chinese). It will also pull some kung fu moves if you ask it to, though mellower types may be happier watching it in yoga mode.

And of course, command it to “have a dance” and Dobi will happily boogie on the spot, whether or not 1,068 other Dobis are dancing along with it.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more