Sunday, December 19, 2004
What are you getting for Xmas?
Checking out the big sellers at Xmas can give us a good idea of the current and emerging tech trends. This year the big sellers are MP3 players (no surprise), PlayStation 2 (because of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and, bit of an odd one here, a farting robot. The 'bot in question is the entertaining and incredibly well built RoboSapien - which is a toy built for hacking if ever there was one. it comes with an infra red remote that can easily be emulated by other IR devices, and if you take the back off you can hook directly into the thing's innards and run it with an iPaq on its back. but best of all, it seems nearly indestructible, all for a snip at around £60. is this how robots will end up in our homes? not through large scale, industrial efforts, but through small, cheap, toy-based products? Puts me in mind of an Asimov story describing the efforts of US Robots to make their products more acceptable to the general public by making them less human-like and hence less threatening...
At the other end of the spectrum, check out Honda's running robot. This 'chap' has been strolling for a few years, but he can now manage a leisurely jog. Impressive stuff. Note that they didn't set out to make a robot that runs like a person, just a robot that runs, but it really does like there's a person inside that suit...
Checking out the big sellers at Xmas can give us a good idea of the current and emerging tech trends. This year the big sellers are MP3 players (no surprise), PlayStation 2 (because of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and, bit of an odd one here, a farting robot. The 'bot in question is the entertaining and incredibly well built RoboSapien - which is a toy built for hacking if ever there was one. it comes with an infra red remote that can easily be emulated by other IR devices, and if you take the back off you can hook directly into the thing's innards and run it with an iPaq on its back. but best of all, it seems nearly indestructible, all for a snip at around £60. is this how robots will end up in our homes? not through large scale, industrial efforts, but through small, cheap, toy-based products? Puts me in mind of an Asimov story describing the efforts of US Robots to make their products more acceptable to the general public by making them less human-like and hence less threatening...
At the other end of the spectrum, check out Honda's running robot. This 'chap' has been strolling for a few years, but he can now manage a leisurely jog. Impressive stuff. Note that they didn't set out to make a robot that runs like a person, just a robot that runs, but it really does like there's a person inside that suit...
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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