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IP: Bow Wow! Sony "Aibo" first impressions
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:10:10 -0400
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:06:02 -0700 (PDT) From: John Wharton <jwharton () netcom com> To: farber () cis upenn edu Dave-- Well, my Sony Aibo robot dog just arrived, Serial # 3600004. One of the earlier units, I would guess, since they only built 2,000 for the US market. Haven't done much with him yet -- gotta top off his batteries first -- but I have to admit, Rags is a cute little fellow, for a robot. Albeit somewhat sterile. Some initial reactions: o Firmware, status information, and "learned behaviors" are stored on a an 8-MB Sony "memory stick" about two inches long. Sure enough, the memory stick gets inserted into the dog's body in /exactly/ the place you'd sort of hoped they would /not/ have asked you to insert it. o Batteries are inserted in the same place, recalling the Woody Allen joke in "Sleeper" about un-house-trained robot dogs "leaving little batteries all over the floor". One wonders if this is due to South Park influence or some sort of scatalogical engineering humor. (I seem to recall the British term for batteries is "piles". There's probably a bad pun there somewhere, but I can't find the punchline.) o The user interface and remote control appear on first blush to be fairly obscure, with way more modes and complexity than would seem necessary. The remote control issues commands by playing charming little musical tunes. With practice, you can send Aibo commands from a piano or flute; the remote control marks each key with its corresponding note to help you learn what to play. How quaint. Aibo responds in what the manual calls "robot language" -- which sounds uncannily like R2D2 beeps and squooks. And is equally unintelligable. o "Aibo", BTW, purportedly comes from "Artificially Intelligent roBOt". And the Japanese word "aibou" supposedly means "partner" or "pal". o I'm intrigued by the aesthetic distinctions between Aibo and Furby. Dave Hampton, the Furby designer, adopted guidelines that Furby should contain nothing that would seem unnatural or "make it look stupid". Thus Furby is fuzzy, has expressive eyes, giggles and talks (in occasional gibberish), and has no on-off switch. ("Your cat doesn't need to be switched on every morning, does it?", Dave Hampton asks.) Whereas Aibo is built of hard metal-flake plastic and has a helmet for a head, with cooling vents on its back, an air filter in its belly, and a fairly audible cooling fan -- probably an artifact of the 64-bit MIPS (?) RISC processor inside. (Too bad they didn't just use a network of CMOS 8051s! :-) And it's got lots of blinking status lights, eyes that glow bright red ("when it's angry", according to the manual), and a "pause" switch on its chest. And if you whack the poor fellow on the head when he misbehaves, "Aibo will understand that it is being scolded". A cultural anthropologist might enjoy analyzing the Aibo design and user interface from the perspective of what Asian vs. Western markets expect of their respective consumer robots. o Haven't yet applied knife and chisel, but best I can tell from surveying the exterior, it looks like the whole thing is assembled with conventional Phillips-head screws and clearly visible plastic snap joints. Skinning this beast should be a piece of cake. How long 'til "Aibo Autopsy" sites start popping up on the web? --John Wharton
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- IP: Bow Wow! Sony "Aibo" first impressions Dave Farber (Aug 16)