We weren’t invited to the wedding, so we’re not certain what proclamation the officiant made standing before the bride and groom and the assembled family and friends. But we would like to suggest that a fitting utterance might have been: “by the program installed in me by the Kokoro Co., Ltd., I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
In what is believed to be a nuptials first, the UK’s The Independent reports that Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue were wed in Tokyo in a ceremony presided over by I-Fairy, a robotic officiant.
While the widespread popularity of weddings performed by robots is probably several years away, the couple whose vows were sealed through such an unusual and digital manner were proud to have tied the knot silicon-style. The bride is an employee of Kokoro, I-Fairy’s manufacturer, and the groom is a professor of robotics at the Japanese Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
I-Fairy, as The Independent reports, was bedecked in a flowered headdress, and spoke from the vantage point of the chair onto which it was bolted. A tangle of wires led from I-Fairy’s chair to the robot’s operator who was seated at the controls hidden from view. We’re reasonably confident that owing to the highly unusual first-of-its-kind spectacle, no attention was paid to the man behind the curtain.
Photo by gruntzooki via Flickr.