Vitaly Bulgarov is a concept artist who used to work at Blizzard on stuff like StarCraft. He’s now working on something a lot cooler.
Bulgarov has been helping out a company called Korea Future Technology on their latest project, which is called METHOD-1: a big, real, functioning mech. Not a stage prop, not a promotional gimmick, but a serious attempt at working through the early stages of getting one of these things off the screen/comic book pages and into the real world.
This mech isn’t being designed as a solution to real world problems. Instead, it’s coming at the situation from the other way around: KFT is building a mech to see just what scenarios it could work in, and what parts of its tech are more useful than others (so, say, if the idea of a bipedal robot was crap but those robot arms were useful, then using them somewhere else).
Here are a couple of compilation videos showing the mech waving its arms around and, more importantly, walking:
You can see more of Vitaly’s work — including a lot of cool mech designs — at his personal site.
Let’s hope it goes better than this.
Comments
4 responses to “Koreans Are Building A Real Mech”
the stiff arm movement in the first video reminds me of those build / construction mechs in early Gundam series.
and while i don’t know what effects strapping a giant engine on its back might cause. i can totally see the arms + torso combination being used to help build the next generation of space stations (or moon bases)
*looks at Japan*
You gonna let em do ya like that?
Japan is too busy getting their mech ready for the impending mecha deathmatch with the USA.
I feel like an actual mech with legs is extremely inefficient. Arms make total sense, but wouldn’t the more practical idea be to have something like tank treads with an adjustable waist to simulate crouching/stretching heights?