Ah, the tried-and-true unboxing. It’s a staple of tech blogging – perhaps not quite as popular as it once was, but still popular nonetheless.
If you’ve never witnessed an unboxing, it’s pretty much just like it sounds. Someone with a camera films him or herself taking a product out of the box. Fascinating, no? For your reference, here’s the Xbox One being unboxed. This particular unboxing has been edited into a short, watchable video; some unboxings are either only lightly edited or not edited at all, and can stretch towards what feels like the end of time.
There’s a certain competitive spirit to the great unboxing tradition, and the following unboxing of a life-size humanoid robot by the team at MIT looking to compete in December’s DARPA robotics challenge leaves most standard unboxings in the dust. I mean, these guys are unboxing the same model robot our own Matt Peckham referred to as the lovechild of Johnny Five and a flayed T-800:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mAbH2d8zQg]
I, for one, like the wooden crate effect, but I have to admit I was a tad disappointed to not see the leg lamp from A Christmas Story pop out, as I equate all wooden-crate shipments with that leg lamp.
Come to think of it, that leg lamp unboxing was pretty epic in and of itself. I suppose a life-size robot is somewhat cooler than “the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window,” however. Somewhat cooler.
MIT DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Team [MIT.edu via Geek.com]