DoubleRobotics: Telepresence gets sexy (and made in the USA) | Hacker News Reader

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

venturebeat.com

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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.

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

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

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

You mean spin-off company? Suitable is developing the Texai robot into a product.

This is all correct. Suitable is a spin-off from Willow Garage, with many of the same people involved. Suitable's first product is based off the Texai project from Willow. The Texai was featured on the Big Bang Theory in one episode.

Din't think it was a real product, thought it was something they rigged up for the show. Thanks for the link.

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

That's the one!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

"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).

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.

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

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.

Yep, the key is speed, hence why I said "flick". Next time you're in a meeting keep track of how many times you look at someone and back in less than a second.

But we have to go through this step before we can advance the technology, so I'm all for these style of robots.

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.

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.

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.

The car sounds from The Jetsons

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

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.

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

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

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-...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The only problem - punching in the face :)

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

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

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

would be better if it's controlled by google glasses

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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