Vstone, a Japanese manufacturing company, is currently producing robots of the adorable variety. The idea behind these tiny robots is to bring the robotics hobby to a wider audience with smaller, cheaper programmable units to get a feel for how real bots can operate.
from Robot Gossip:
The Robovie-i is a small and relatively inexpensive robot for experimenters. The -i in the name stands for ‘introduction’ to the exciting world of robots.
After you assemble the robot it basically just walks and dances. It comes with ‘RobovieMaker’ software to edit the movements. The file is then downloaded to the little robot.
While I totally understand and appreciate the idea of getting robots into a wider and younger base, the provided video completely crushed my hopes that the Robovie-i could become the robo-butler of my dreams. It appears instead that Vstone has created a much more updated version of a wind-up toy. At $262 a pop, you may be better off with this contribution from reader Evan. The company does offer some other great humanoid bots that do in fact show promise.
Ok, maybe I lied. Maybe these shoes don’t deserve the term geexy, but they are definitely … something. Some of you may know how I feel about Tron, but that aside I can’t imagine any circumstance where I would subject my feet to such nonsense. Kotaku seems to think otherwise though.
In 1982 Tron was one of the first films to incorporate computer generated graphics. Over the years Tron has achieved an almost cult status amongst computer gamers around the world. The Stan Smith Comfort shows Tron himself on the tongue and his enemy the Master Control Programmer on the footbed.
This beautiful piece of technology is a fully interactive bar-counter that has multi-input touchscreen capabilities. The functions of this device can range from “connectifity”, where all guests at the counter are connected through dynamic luminous lines, to “iBar Pong”, where a virtual ball is bounced across the counter and allowed to interact with various objects. This is simply brilliant. However, the obligatory newage music is not included.
iBar is a system for the interactive design of any bar-counter. Integrated video-projectors can project any content on the milky bar-surface. The intelligent tracking system of iBar detects all objects touching the surface. This input is used to let the projected content interact dynamically with the movements on the counter. Objects can be illuminated at their position or virtual objects can be “touched” with the fingers.
The romantic geek is a strange breed. One such example here shows a man proposing to his girlfriend through the live webcam Apple set up to monitor their upcoming 24×7 store in New York. I just hope his girlfriend happened to be watching the site at that exact moment or this whole act of public humiliation would have been for nothing.
