Social communication “eyeball” robot
Via News.3yen, this incredible Muusocia developed by ATR and Systec Akazawa. Described by news.3yen as a “social communication robot”:
The website claims that its “purpose is to make the existence consciousness of the person reconfirm who touches the Muu” …whatever the hell that means. The eyeball robot is aimed for RESIDENTS in nursing facilities and the like. The Muu has a general-purpose design which can be used as a receptionist or companion to the autistic using its ability to recognize person’s faces and voices and answer questions.
(…)
“Muu Socia has voice recognition, voice synthesis, speech processing and face recognition capabilities. And it starts bouncing around when something obstructs its view
A video about it here (.WMV, 5Mb).
Why do I blog this? yet another curious non-anthromorphic robot-like device a la nabaztag. Occurences of such artifacts are interesting to me because it shows the convergence between pervasive computing and robots. What about the user experience of such devices?
July 14th, 2006 at 10:10 am
WOTS a “nabaztag”?!?
Ok, ok, I see that a nabaztag is a rip-off of the Japanese “PostPet” (a pink email robot teddy-bear) of the 1990s.
The user experience of the Japanese “PostPet” was fuckquing fantastic and it WAS a cult item in Japan for five years. However, the PostPet ran on worst-in-world Sony software which crashed hourly. The users, mostly young women, rebelled against the product and it went to No 1 to a shamefull product in recent years. (There should be a mandatory death penalty for all the crappy software SONY puts out—once again SONY commits economic treason).
Nabaztag
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag
VS
PostPet
http://www.postpet.so-net.ne.jp/index.html