Best idea of the week…a robot to attend your meetings.
From dailymail.co.uk
Fed up with attending endless meetings when you’d much rather be at home? Step forward the QB from Anybots – a robot who can go to the office for you.
Developed by Bob Christopher, the brainchild behind the Pleo dinosaurs, the cute looking robot is essentially a teleconferencing system on wheels.
The robot can alter its height from 3ft to 5.7ft and weighs 2.5st, with a main computer and several mini-computers on board. It has an LCD monitor mounted on its head which feeds a webcam image of the telecommuter.
It ‘sees’ via a 5MP video camera in one eye, and a lower resolution camera on the head that points downwards. It ‘hears’ via three microphones that feed audio to the telecommuter, and has high-quality speakers for audio in the other direction.
Alright, nicely played. This thing costs 15K, however. I’m pretty sure I could do the same damned thing with an HTC Incredible, broom, Arduino, and an electric wheelchair motor. I would need an area to put some tattoos and earbuds, however. And somehow mimic my general sense of ‘leave me alone before I effin snap’ to be fully effective/reflective of me in a meeting situation. And a strong odor of coffee…definitely need that.
