“marine parks industry is experiencing falling revenues due to ethical considerations and the cost of live animals, but the people’s desire to know them and to feel communication with them is as strong as ever… We believe that it is time to reconsider the industry and that this approach (using Dolphin robots. – Approx. “RG”) may be more humane and at the same time more profitable”, – quotes the Guardian Roger Holzberg, one of the members of the team and former creative Director of the Walt Disney Co.
the dolphins animatronic the same 270 pounds of weight that in average an adult bottlenose Dolphin, and the skeleton is almost the same. In their bodies, even the “integrated fat bubbles, which provide buoyancy, and you feel like you’re standing before his living counterpart, when you touch him, move with him or met him,” said Holzberg the radio station CBC Radio One. “When I first saw this Dolphin, I thought that it’s real. If I were a small child, it just would have taken him for a living”, – shared her impressions the participant of the trial swim with a Dolphin robot, which has published on its website the developers. According to Holzberg, Dolphin-animatronik will never ignore the person or unfriendly to treat it – and that’s its main advantage over living counterparts. After all, they remotely controls a specially trained person. Although sometimes it can move independently – it all depends on what kind of event it participates.
However, there is one significant drawback is the price. One Dolphin robot costs about 1.8 billion rubles – is four times more expensive than usual. But, according to developers, the robotic actor Dolphinarium will “live” longer by far than his real counterpart, usually do not live out half his time of captive. The first customers have already found – they were Chinese aquariums. As told to Lee Wang, business developer at Edge Innovation, at least one Chinese enterprise intends to replace the living dolphins by robots.
