Month: August 2021

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  Here's where players started. [credit: Richard Taylor ]

When the early-'80s home video game business began dwindling in the US, Atari looked to a Laserdisc arcade cabinet to boost its fortunes. That's according to Richard Taylor, who served as the film director for Atari Playland, an unreleased arcade cabinet from classic Atari's waning days.

Laserdisc games were already a hot commodity by 1983, as seen in the Don Bluth-directed Dragon's Lair, which used hand-drawn animation instead of an arcade's usual pixellated sprites. But unlike the single-game Dragon’s Lair cabinet, “the idea [or Atari Playland] was to make a freestanding arcade structure that, using Laserdisc, would have 10 games in it,” Taylor told Ars in a recent interview. Also, unlike Dragon's Lair, everything in Playland would be filmed with a real camera floating above elaborate miniatures on sizable sets.

Atari Playland featured multiple miniaturized sets; there were plans for an intro inside a killer clown’s dressing room, a shot outside the park’s entrance, and a fully filmed ride-selection screen. The construction of those sets was “not cheap,” according to Taylor, and required a lot of specifically filmed transitions.

Enlarge / Today, in robots-and-fireworks news. (credit: Getty Images)

Establishing human-robot harmony in the workplace isn't always easy. Beyond the common fear of automation taking human jobs, robots sometimes simply mess up. When this happens, reestablishing trust between robots and their human colleagues can be a tricky affair.

However, new research sheds some light on how automated workers can restore confidence. Largely, the study suggests that humans have an easier time trusting a robot that makes a mistake if it appears somewhat human and if the machine offers some kind of explanation, according to Lionel Robert, an associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information.

When robots mess up

Even though robots are made of metal and plastic, Robert said we need to start considering our interactions with them in social terms, particularly if we want to have humans trust and rely on their automated co-workers. "Humans mess up and are able to keep working together," he told Ars.