Man's 'Scarlett Johansson' robot

Ricky Ma, a products and graphics designer from Hong Kong has built a life-like, programmable robot. Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labours of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than NZ 72,427, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modelled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone.