In what would amount as a historic occasion over at Microsoft Surface HQ, a team member officially blogged about Patty. There’s even a video of it in action. Wait, who’s Patty? Patty is a wonderful robot that conducts stress tests on the screens of Microsoft Surface units. See, with lots of touching and pressure involved when using a platform like the Surface, it’s important that the exterior can withstand the wear and tear.

Unfortunately due to repeated technical errors, a full embed is not possible at this time. For best results, open the source link down south for the good stuff.

Okay, all it shows is Patty going about her work. Not exactly a Michael Bay epic in the vein of those awful Transformers sequels, but certainly a rare glimpse into a real live machine. This reminds us of a recent development over at Foxconn, the Chinese company that’s the world’s leading maker of electronic gadgets: apparently a large percentage of the workforce will be replaced by robots. That would be interesting to see.

In the accompanying brief blog post, the author hinted at the Squiddy, which is another testing device kept under wraps at the moment. Though watching a robot at work is fascinating, we do lament the fact that robots are still pure function these days. When will form be as important? In other words, when can robots start getting sexy? After all, they’ll be part of our everyday lives in a matter of years.

Source Microsoft Square blog