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DoubleRobotics: Telepresence gets sexy (and made in the USA)
- aklofas 14y agoVery cool. There is a sense of irony in that Trevor Blackwell along with the other YC partners are backing a company that essentially wants to put AnyBots out of business. Interesting none-the-less though.
- nandemo 14y agoFWIW, Trevor (tlb) made a comment in a previous DoubleRobotics thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376471 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376471
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tomflack 14y agoUntil you can flick your "head" in the direction of someone who just spoke outside of your field of vision, these will continue to feel like you're at a meeting in a neck brace.
- davidcann 14y agoIt would be fun to hook up a head mounted display, so you just turn your head and the robot turns.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agoor just use the accelerometer of the ipad. turn yourself and and the ipad to look around the room. Would feel like you were moving a virtual window around. I doubt the robot can react fast enough for it to feel natural though.
- tomflack 14y agoYep, the key is speed, hence why I said "flick". Next time you're in a meeting keep track of how many times you look at someone and back in less than a second. But we have to go through this step before we can advance the technology, so I'm all for these style of robots.
- regularfry 14y agoA fisheye lens mounted on the ipad might help there. It's just about high enough res that you might get away with rectifying the image to get rid of the distortion at the human end.
- fsiefken 14y agoyes, exactly. but then the remote audience will miss the cue that you are turning your gaze - so perhaps it can do both: turn on it's axis and rotate in the already transferring fisheye stream.
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoThis reminds of that board meeting scene in Demolition Man with all the monoliths with screens each projecting a participant's face on them. It seems interesting but I wonder if people would welcome this. Having an iPad with my boss' face on it rolling behind me at work feels creepy.
- nivla 14y agoActually this reminded me of that episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon gets paranoid about germs or something and builds a similar device to interact with others. It was also the episode where they bring in Steve Wozniak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K1uj9VmCzo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K1uj9VmCzo
- tobias3 14y agoThey used this one: http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/texai/overview http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/texai/overview (Competition coming soon https://www.suitabletech.com/ https://www.suitabletech.com/ )
- cmansley 14y agoYou mean spin-off company? Suitable is developing the Texai robot into a product.
- willowgarage 14y agoThis is all correct. Suitable is a spin-off from Willow Garage, with many of the same people involved. Suitable's first product is based off the Texai project from Willow. The Texai was featured on the Big Bang Theory in one episode.
- nivla 14y agoDin't think it was a real product, thought it was something they rigged up for the show. Thanks for the link.
- 14y ago
- blablabla123 14y agoIt's not sexy, it's f'd up when someone annoys you with a Skype-Segway.
- tobobo 14y agoCan they include a pleasant "walking" noise (or something more abstract) so that it isn't sneaking up on you all the time? It looks a bit too sneaky in this video.
- Devilboy 14y agoThe car sounds from The Jetsons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdWswvLPdE0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdWswvLPdE0
- tdubhro1 14y agoVery cool. How about a bunch of these located in places like the Louvre, the British Museum, that become available to rent when the museums are closed to physically-present tourists? The timezones work out great for people in the US, and the museums have nothing to lose since it's all incremental revenue.
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoOr at least virtual security guards in museums if they decide they don't like visitors at late hours.
- adrianhon 14y agoWhen I saw the use case of a couple settling down to look at a (likely non-HD) video... of large paintings... on a 10" display... from a robot... that you have to drive yourself... - well, I laughed. Yes, it sounds cool, for all of about five seconds, until you realise how irritating it would be. Presumably it wouldn't be free, either. One could argue that this would be great for disabled people. Maybe so, but that wasn't what was shown. However, when they hook up a 360 degree high-def camera and feed it through to a next-gen Oculus Rift VR headset, yeah, then we'll talk.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago"located in places like the Louvre, the British Museum, that become available to rent when the museums are closed to physically-present tourists?" Not going to happen. Public museums of Europe want you to go there. European cities like London, Paris, Madrid and Prague have cultural tourism as one of their main incomes. They don't want to have the experience comoditized. Also security has enough problems with telephones that robbers use to track the guards if they have them in their line of vision. Add one of those "guard trackers" inside the museum, so they could study their movements and know exactly what they are doing, how much they are, and where they are, their age, their corpulence, the arms they carry, their phisio-phisical state(guards some times are somnolent).
- ricksta 14y agowould be better if it's controlled by google glasses
- alpine 14y agoCan it run iPad apps at the same time as being in telepresence mode? Imagine two of these meeting and exchanging photos or agreeing to a game of chess autonomously.
- stinos 14y agoam I the only one finding this anything but sexy? My girl is sexy. This is a device that looks like a broom with a flatscreen mounted on top.
- Nux 14y agoMakes me think of this "Surrogates". NOT sexy. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
- Jarihd 14y agoOT: Can somebody tell whats the music track in the video ??? awesome track, made me feel happy :-)
- grabeh 14y agoI think it may be a slight remix of 'Paradise' by Coldplay.
- mbq 14y agoI've seen this before... Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IvanAnywhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IvanAnywhere
- GFischer 14y agoThe main difference from older products is price (and probably availability too). At a price of a plane ticket, it becomes more attractive - if it can reasonably simulate an in-person meeting, which is yet to be determined. I don't think it will replace sales calls just yet, but it's a step forward. Edit: AnyBots is U$ 15.000, so this is an order of magnitude cheaper. And I found on Google TILR at U$ 10.000 http://robodynamics.com/products/ http://robodynamics.com/products/ Plus, I found a hack of an iRobot that claims to give you a similar device for U$ 500 :) http://www.fastcompany.com/1726174/500-irobot-hack-lets-you-be-two-places-once http://www.fastcompany.com/1726174/500-irobot-hack-lets-you-...
- melloclello 14y agoDoes this not buzz anybody else out? Getting a wee bit future nauseous over here
- macleodan 14y agoI found the title misleading; I was expecting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
- goggles99 14y agoCool but impractical. Not gonna make it big. It would take some of those Google glasses controlling it (and at real time turning speed) to even approach practicality.
- laverick 14y agoWonder how stable the gyro is. I can just see someone walking around the corner, bumping into this thing and crashing your telepresence to the floor.
- ricardobeat 14y agoA gyro-stabilized thing like this is usually more stable than a three our four-wheeled one, which can't fight back it's own weight.
- michaelt 14y agoProducts like the Headthere Giraffe have a heavy-ass base full of batteries so the centre of gravity is lower than an office swivel chair. Which of course keeps it stable even if the battery runs down or the software crashes. It's not a very elegant design, though, and it makes carrying the thing a hassle.
- coob 14y agoHow do they cope with stairs? I am imagining something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAPwh0SMzIo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAPwh0SMzIo
- stefek99 14y agoThe only problem - punching in the face :)
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoSomething about this feels really weird to me, like something out of a Woody Allen movie. Can you picture a company full of these guys? A restaurant with half the tables having robots sitting at them? A sporting even where little iPads sit in seats watching the action? Just feels --- odd. Usually when I feel this way it's a great idea, because I have terrible instincts, so keep up the good work, guys! I'd love to try this out with various technology teams I help that do distributed work.
- wmblaettler 14y agoIt's does seem rather sci-fi to send a robot in your place or to embody a robot that is at a location where regular people are also located. I can more easily accept the idea of a telepresence robot in an office, but even that is rather uncanny. It will be interesting to see if this tech really goes mainstream over the coming decades -- I predict it will. Just an observation: a telepresence robot at a restaurant would not do much good in that the it cannot eat for you. But robotic servers -- that's entirely feasible.
- jermaink 14y agoEven if I would never like to visit a museum via iPad screen, the concept looks really great!
- TallGuyShort 14y agoCan you imagine the youthful hijinks if anybody ever tried walking one of these down a populated public street?