Vids › The Weirdness, Part 4

KUKA – The Revenge

2015 · Directed by Matthias Zentner

252K Likes

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Best comments

1.“Let's be honest: you didn't search for this. This video found you.”

More comments

2.“'Legend in table tennis'... proceeds to play a melody on wine glasses?!”
3.“He could have just played two notes at the same time from opposite ends of the table and instantly won.”

The story

Round one went to the human. In 2014 KUKA, the German robot maker from Augsburg, put its KR AGILUS industrial arm across a ping-pong table from Timo Boll, Germany's table tennis star, and the robot took a beating. This 2015 commercial is the rematch. No rackets this time. No balls. Only glass.

Director Matthias Zentner and the Munich production house Velvet turned the sequel into a contest of musical creativity instead of sport. The robot trades its paddle for a five-fingered SCHUNK hand built to grip almost as well as a human one. The score came from Century Rolls Music, with glass harp parts composed and played by the GlassDuo, Anna and Arkadiusz Szafraniec. Michael Hasslacher handled the robot programming.

It's an ad, sure. KUKA wants factory buyers to know its arm is fast and precise at picking, placing and assembling. But it's an ad with a cliffhanger – who cracks first, the athlete or the machine – and it picked up a German Digital Award and a Deutscher Werbefilmpreis nomination in 2016. A sports hero and a robot arm, dueling on glass. Compared to most commercials, that's art.

Tech

In my playlists

The Weirdness, Part 4 · #66

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