A "curious" lamp that responds to human faces has been brought to life by three Victoria University students.
In the spirit of Disney Pixar's lovable animated lamp Luxo Jr, "Pinokio" is an inanimate object testing the boundaries between machines and living beings.
The project is a collaborative effort by Victoria University students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Gur and Joss Doggett, who met in a Physical Computing class.
The lamp's movements are informed by a webcam with an algorithm working behind it.
Robotics and facial recognition technology enable the lamp to search for faces in the images from its webcam. When it spots a face, it follows as if trying to maintain eye contact.
"It basically behaves like a dog, sitting on your desk," said Pinokio's programmer and software engineer Zhou.
"That looking around behaviour is totally random in a completely organic way."