Remote-Controlled Ball Holds Potential Delights

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/technology/personaltech/remote-controlled-ball-holds-potential-delights-state-of-the-art.html?_r=1&ref=technology

by FluidDjango • 15 years ago

26 10 15 years ago

nytimes.com

unwind• 15 years ago

The article talks about an included app that lets you remote-control the ball with your phone, while also enabling the phone's camera so you can film any pets' interactions with the ball.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sphero+cat&o... is the result on YouTube, focusing on cats for no particular reason other than that it reminded me of the classica application of laster pointer tech as a cat toy.

So far, the results are not very impressive. :)

kokey• 15 years ago

If an Apple app can control this ball, surely the inPulse from http://www.getinpulse.com/ should be able to get Apple to approve bluetooth control for them?

colinm• 15 years ago

Will Americans really buy any crap?

FluidDjango• 15 years ago

That was the observation of P. T. Barnum over 100 years ago ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum ).

I've not head behavioral economists' studies that cast doubt on it. The classic case of marketing > sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_rock

gallamine2• 15 years ago

Ian Bernstein, the founder at Orbotix, has been around on the amateur robotics scene for a very long time. He started a popular BEAM robotics website many years ago (http://beam-online.com/). I took a lot of inspiration from him during my highschool years. It's great to see folks like this making waves with actual hardware (the very neat AR Drone from Parrot also comes to mind). They were part of the Boulder Tech Stars summer program (http://www.gosphero.com/techstars-boulder-demo-day-is-here).

While some folks might scoff at the product, keep in mind all of the potential uses for smart phones interfacing with robotics and hardware in the real world. I think this is just the beginning. Toys are a gateway drug :)

jgrahamc• 15 years ago

A very interesting project.

I've been interested in rolling ball robots for sometime after reading about Roball http://www.gel.usherbrooke.ca/laborius/projects/Roball/index...

I would be very interested to see a tear down of one of these, or alternatively, if the developers want to send me one I'll be happy to tear it down and blog about it :-)

gallamine2• 15 years ago

You can sort of see the concept in this blog post: http://www.gosphero.com/sphero-with-his-chariot

It's unlike the Roball project, in that Sphero's actuators don't appear to be affixed to the shell. It's very much "hamster in ball"-like. Another helpful video here: http://www.gosphero.com/sphero-sneak-peak-video

atomical• 15 years ago

I sent them an e-mail telling them the price point is all wrong a while back. The majority of smart phone owners aren't going to pay over $40 for a smart phone toy.

prabhu-pd• 15 years ago

they should make these into car wheels and drive cars with smartphones

alexhawdon• 15 years ago

I'm from Yorkshire, so I'm quite tight with money, but I'm sure this is well over the 'impulse buy' threshold for all but the 1%.

If I'm going to spend $130 on something, I want to be a little convinced that I'll still enjoy using it after an hour. A remote controlled ball? I don't think so.

Remote-Controlled Ball Holds Potential Delights

Related Stories