DoubleRobotics: Telepresence gets sexy (and made in the USA)

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/13/doublerobotics-telepresence-gets-sexy-and-made-in-the-usa/

by Undertow10 • 14 years ago

128 49 14 years ago

aklofas• 14 years ago

Very cool.

There is a sense of irony in that Trevor Blackwell along with the other YC partners are backing a company that essentially wants to put AnyBots out of business.

Interesting none-the-less though.

nandemo• 14 years ago

FWIW, Trevor (tlb) made a comment in a previous DoubleRobotics thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376471

tomflack2• 14 years ago

Until you can flick your "head" in the direction of someone who just spoke outside of your field of vision, these will continue to feel like you're at a meeting in a neck brace.

davidcann• 14 years ago

It would be fun to hook up a head mounted display, so you just turn your head and the robot turns.

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

or just use the accelerometer of the ipad. turn yourself and and the ipad to look around the room. Would feel like you were moving a virtual window around. I doubt the robot can react fast enough for it to feel natural though.

regularfry• 14 years ago

A fisheye lens mounted on the ipad might help there. It's just about high enough res that you might get away with rectifying the image to get rid of the distortion at the human end.

fsiefken• 14 years ago

yes, exactly. but then the remote audience will miss the cue that you are turning your gaze - so perhaps it can do both: turn on it's axis and rotate in the already transferring fisheye stream.

jayfuerstenberg3• 14 years ago

This reminds of that board meeting scene in Demolition Man with all the monoliths with screens each projecting a participant's face on them.

It seems interesting but I wonder if people would welcome this. Having an iPad with my boss' face on it rolling behind me at work feels creepy.

nivla2• 14 years ago

Actually this reminded me of that episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon gets paranoid about germs or something and builds a similar device to interact with others. It was also the episode where they bring in Steve Wozniak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K1uj9VmCzo

tobias3• 14 years ago

They used this one: http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/texai/overview

(Competition coming soon https://www.suitabletech.com/ )

fosk• 14 years ago

For reference, this is the scene: http://ispr.info/files/2011/07/DemolitionMan.jpg

jayfuerstenberg3• 14 years ago

That's the one!

macavity23• 14 years ago

You might not welcome it, but your boss would probably be keen - and he'll be paying :-)

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

Actually this reminds me of an interview with Doug Engelbart talking about molding CRT displays to the shape of heads and using them as the ultimate telepresence robots.

aneth4• 14 years ago

How about having an iPad with your boss' fade on it rolling behind everyone at the same time?

sp332• 14 years ago

Or the movie Surrogates, where everyone just uses a robot avatar for everything, and never actually leave their houses.

blablabla123• 14 years ago

It's not sexy, it's f'd up when someone annoys you with a Skype-Segway.

chii• 14 years ago

you can just dangle the robot up a wall, and they can't follow you. Can't do that with a human...

gmaslov• 14 years ago

Well you can, but it's not very polite.

tobobo• 14 years ago

Can they include a pleasant "walking" noise (or something more abstract) so that it isn't sneaking up on you all the time? It looks a bit too sneaky in this video.

Devilboy• 14 years ago

The car sounds from The Jetsons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdWswvLPdE0

tdubhro1• 14 years ago

Very cool. How about a bunch of these located in places like the Louvre, the British Museum, that become available to rent when the museums are closed to physically-present tourists?

The timezones work out great for people in the US, and the museums have nothing to lose since it's all incremental revenue.

jayfuerstenberg3• 14 years ago

Or at least virtual security guards in museums if they decide they don't like visitors at late hours.

adrianhon• 14 years ago

When I saw the use case of a couple settling down to look at a (likely non-HD) video... of large paintings... on a 10" display... from a robot... that you have to drive yourself... - well, I laughed. Yes, it sounds cool, for all of about five seconds, until you realise how irritating it would be. Presumably it wouldn't be free, either.

One could argue that this would be great for disabled people. Maybe so, but that wasn't what was shown. However, when they hook up a 360 degree high-def camera and feed it through to a next-gen Oculus Rift VR headset, yeah, then we'll talk.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

"located in places like the Louvre, the British Museum, that become available to rent when the museums are closed to physically-present tourists?"

Not going to happen. Public museums of Europe want you to go there. European cities like London, Paris, Madrid and Prague have cultural tourism as one of their main incomes. They don't want to have the experience comoditized.

Also security has enough problems with telephones that robbers use to track the guards if they have them in their line of vision. Add one of those "guard trackers" inside the museum, so they could study their movements and know exactly what they are doing, how much they are, and where they are, their age, their corpulence, the arms they carry, their phisio-phisical state(guards some times are somnolent).

ricksta• 14 years ago

would be better if it's controlled by google glasses

alpine• 14 years ago

Can it run iPad apps at the same time as being in telepresence mode? Imagine two of these meeting and exchanging photos or agreeing to a game of chess autonomously.

stinos• 14 years ago

am I the only one finding this anything but sexy? My girl is sexy. This is a device that looks like a broom with a flatscreen mounted on top.

Nux• 14 years ago

Makes me think of this "Surrogates". NOT sexy. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/

Jarihd• 14 years ago

OT: Can somebody tell whats the music track in the video ??? awesome track, made me feel happy :-)

grabeh• 14 years ago

I think it may be a slight remix of 'Paradise' by Coldplay.

mbq• 14 years ago

I've seen this before... Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IvanAnywhere

GFischer• 14 years ago

The main difference from older products is price (and probably availability too). At a price of a plane ticket, it becomes more attractive - if it can reasonably simulate an in-person meeting, which is yet to be determined.

I don't think it will replace sales calls just yet, but it's a step forward.

Edit: AnyBots is U$ 15.000, so this is an order of magnitude cheaper.

And I found on Google TILR at U$ 10.000 http://robodynamics.com/products/

Plus, I found a hack of an iRobot that claims to give you a similar device for U$ 500 :)

http://www.fastcompany.com/1726174/500-irobot-hack-lets-you-...

melloclello• 14 years ago

Does this not buzz anybody else out? Getting a wee bit future nauseous over here

macleodan• 14 years ago

I found the title misleading; I was expecting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics

goggles99• 14 years ago

Cool but impractical. Not gonna make it big. It would take some of those Google glasses controlling it (and at real time turning speed) to even approach practicality.

laverick• 14 years ago

Wonder how stable the gyro is. I can just see someone walking around the corner, bumping into this thing and crashing your telepresence to the floor.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

A gyro-stabilized thing like this is usually more stable than a three our four-wheeled one, which can't fight back it's own weight.

michaelt• 14 years ago

Products like the Headthere Giraffe have a heavy-ass base full of batteries so the centre of gravity is lower than an office swivel chair. Which of course keeps it stable even if the battery runs down or the software crashes.

It's not a very elegant design, though, and it makes carrying the thing a hassle.

coob• 14 years ago

How do they cope with stairs? I am imagining something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAPwh0SMzIo

stefek99• 14 years ago

The only problem - punching in the face :)

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

Something about this feels really weird to me, like something out of a Woody Allen movie. Can you picture a company full of these guys? A restaurant with half the tables having robots sitting at them? A sporting even where little iPads sit in seats watching the action? Just feels --- odd.

Usually when I feel this way it's a great idea, because I have terrible instincts, so keep up the good work, guys! I'd love to try this out with various technology teams I help that do distributed work.

wmblaettler• 14 years ago

It's does seem rather sci-fi to send a robot in your place or to embody a robot that is at a location where regular people are also located. I can more easily accept the idea of a telepresence robot in an office, but even that is rather uncanny.

It will be interesting to see if this tech really goes mainstream over the coming decades -- I predict it will.

Just an observation: a telepresence robot at a restaurant would not do much good in that the it cannot eat for you. But robotic servers -- that's entirely feasible.

jermaink• 14 years ago

Even if I would never like to visit a museum via iPad screen, the concept looks really great!

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

Can you imagine the youthful hijinks if anybody ever tried walking one of these down a populated public street?

DoubleRobotics: Telepresence gets sexy (and made in the USA)

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