Robotic balls that drive the cats nuts

A Boulder, CO based company called Orbotix claims to have developed the world's first robotic ball, and it's going to hit the shelves soon. It can be controlled by Apple and Android smartphones, and is meant to be a mixed reality gaming product. Think of playing pong on the floor of your living room, office golf without a club, or just chasing the cats around.





Of course this is just a fun little gadget for the gadget geeks among us. But I can see this going somewhere, towards more impactful innovations. We have the spherical robot going, what else can we do with it? Maybe we will develop it into a new means of transportation, a replacement for the single-axis wheel, or perhaps a complete multifunctional and intelligent home robot/pet. We live in times of great innovation, the world is getting linked, the world is starting to move.

Transformer shoes

I just love transformable objects like these Nike shoes/toys. Our world is so static, cold and distant to us that people are still the most interesting things out there. I would like objects to start pulling tricks on us. To show us who we are, to mock us, to surprise and enlighten us. But most of all, to inspire us.

Dr. Pekoppa to the rescue

Sometimes the only thing you need is someone, or something, that listens to you and understands you in an intuitive way. Something that just responds minimally and does not talk back. As most partners do not fulfill this requirement, the Japanese at SegaToys filled this gap in the market by introducing for once not a robotic fembot, fish or chick, but a cute little plant called Pekoppa.

This wiggly artefact moves its stem and leaves in a surprisingly expressive way, and because it's shape and movements are so ambiguous it gives people all the space to create their own narrative around this artificial plant, especially because it actually reacts to human voices. The following movie mainly shows some Japanese people getting things of their chest with this little healer, but some simply seem to have a nice social conversation with it, or decide to sing a song for it.



It is interesting that this 'device' is marketed under the nickname 'Healing Leafs', and I strongly believe that such developments can have significant psychological impact on society. It is maybe not very noticeable, but humanity is undergoing an enormous psychological crisis, desperately labeling any anomaly as yet another disorder, and rates of suicides, addiction, and depression are staggering. We lost a connection to our selves, are distracted by all sorts of fairly meaningless chunks of data and abstract goals imposed upon us mainly by the mirror of the media, and society, and I believe strongly that technologies can help us reconnect and have us reflect more, in a playful, empowering, and motivating way.

NeoCube

Pretty interesting an artefact, this NeoCube, or should I say artefacts, since it is composed of 216 smaller magnets. Considering this could have been made already back in the 1930s it makes you wonder why such a product gets released only just now. It does have a little bit of a pseudo science-fiction flavour to it, and it's interesting that it seems to follow the simple but more and more ubiquitous idea of having many simple elements make up something more than the sum of its parts.

Seeing the NeoCube in action can be quite inspiring if you relate it to the way products could become reconfigurable by the end-user, or could be calmly self-reconfiguring based on how its user interacts with it.

More on http://www.theneocube.com