Crossing the uncanny valley by hand.
Orbicularis builds expressive micro-robotics — motorized, emotional, versatile, and small enough to sit in your hand. This is how one gets made, from a lump of clay to something that looks back at you.
The problem is the face
Robots are good at moving. They are bad at being believed. The moment a machine tries to look like something alive and misses, people feel it instantly — that flinch is the uncanny valley, and almost every expressive robot ever built lives at the bottom of it.
We started Orbicularis to cross it. Not with a bigger processor or a smarter voice, but with the thing film effects shops have understood for forty years: a face only reads as alive when the material, the sculpt and the movement agree with each other.
It starts in clay
Every character begins as a lump of clay pushed around by hand. No parametric model, no generated mesh — a person sitting at a bench, moving a brow a fraction of a millimeter and asking whether it changed anything.
This is the slowest part of the process and the part we refuse to shorten. If the expression isn't in the sculpt, no amount of mechanism downstream will put it there.
Plaster remembers everything
The sculpt gets molded in plaster. A mold is an honest critic: it records exactly what you made, including the parts you were hoping nobody would notice.
We pull test skins, put them under studio light, and look at how shadow moves across the cheek and the corner of the mouth. When it doesn't read right, we go back to the clay. That loop has run more times than we'd like to admit.
Skin that moves like skin
Silicone is where the sculpt becomes a face. The material has to be soft enough to crease the way real skin creases and tough enough to survive being driven thousands of times.
Get it wrong and you get rubber. Get it right and light behaves the way it does on something living — which is most of what your eye is actually judging.
The eyes go first
Eyes carry more of a performance than everything else combined. Ours are built as their own mechanism, developed and tested separately long before they go into a head.
Direction of gaze, timing of a blink, the small drift when attention wanders — that's the difference between a machine looking at you and someone looking at you.
Small on purpose
Everything above has to fit inside a robot the size of a human fist. That constraint is not a limitation we accepted — it's the point. Small means it belongs on a desk, in a hand, in a life.
Motorized. Emotional. Versatile. Every part we make has to earn its space against those three words, which is why most weeks are spent removing something rather than adding it.
Does it feel like someone's in there?
That's the only question we ask of a revision. Not whether the spec was met — whether a person walking past stops.
We're taking it to Kickstarter in October 2026. Everything between now and then goes on the build log, and the people on our list see it first.
Join the list to get each week's progress by email before it goes public — and first access when the Kickstarter opens.
Read the weekly build log →