RoPaSci is a networked object created by Carrie Chan, Ari Kobayashi, Ganesh Ramanathan & Pakorn Thienthong. Documentation is currently offline however thanks to the Way Back Machine, I have managed to find a cached version of it’s site here.

RoPaSci is not one of those robot hands you see on TV that are driven by Artificial Intelligence. RoPaSci the Metal Hand is a representation of the hand of a real person who plays a game of Rock Paper Scissors with you across the network. A user would play Rock Paper Scissors with RoPaSci just the way one normally does when playing in front of another person. The only difference is that 2 players do not have to be face-to-face with one another - they can be 4000 miles apart but still play a game or even make a decision together in real time virtually yet very personally.

RoPaSci was created as a final project for the Networked Objects class at New York Universities Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2003. This is the second project from this program I have discussed here (MoBeeLine was the other) and there are many more interesting works (although not all networked) listed on their projects page.