Pleo
“WHEN I FIRST MEET PLEO, the tiny dinosaur is curled up on a kitchen table, its long tail and big head pulled inward. It’s snoring quietly, emitting a strangely soothing sound, almost like the amplified purring of a guinea pig. I’m tempted to reach out and touch it – but it looks so peaceful, I can’t bring myself to disturb it. Then I realize what I’m doing: I’m worrying about waking up a robot.”
Cute!
It is certainly cute and all, but I was kind of expecting it to do a bit more. According to that demo, it seems to have two states: Confused and Asleep.
Read the article – it has a life cycle, and this is part of the baby state. As with most robotic life products, you have to train a personality into your pleo.
Fair enough. I was just basing my opinion on what I saw in the video. Probably should have read further. However, that does speak to the issue of the video not being compelling enough to generate further interest in the product, at least in my case. I saw it in all its inherent sleepyness and shrugged my shoulders with a barely constrained “meh.” As video demos go, not the best in my opinion.
Perhaps that’s true, but it was a demonstration for a reporter from wired news with what I imagine was a handicam – you know how they are. It wasn’t a produced video product placed by marketers, and it was even youtubized.
What *I* noticed when I watched the video was these things – it detects and reacts well to when its feet or back are petted, lifting it’s head into it like a dog would. What I know from the article is that if you pull on it’s feet, you can irritate it. It stretches when it wakes up. It detects edges in a ‘realistic’ way so it doesn’t fall off of a surface it’s put on. It knows whether the lights are on or off. It sort of purrs, yawns, and makes other sounds (they can be hard to hear in the video). It knows when it has been picked up. It’s eyes and head, individually, follow sounds you make. And from what I read, there are NO external switches or levers or anything to break the illusion of a living creature.
That’s all pretty cool to me, and a sight better than the furby.
It is most definitely cool and has a lot of potential. I was simply a little less “wowed” by the video, is all. But I certainly don’t intend to disparage the neatness factor of the technology involved in such a thing. It’s cool, without a doubt. I, for one, welcome our future mechanical overlords.
survey says…. I’ll take popper.
It’s not a replacement for a real life animal, it’s supposed to be the best thing we’ve ever created to fool our own minds into thinking our -toy- is -real-. I think that deserves, IMO, an appropriate sense of awe.
The best part is the audible gasp when he reached the edge of the table.
*dies*
; )
I WANT ONE!
Besides being nifty new tech, I’m all for things that let apartment dwellers who can’t have pets (like me), have some semblance of a pet.