So, today at the WWDC conference, it looks like there could be another player dipping their toe in the pool – Taptic Toys.
Their Creative Director, Romina Espinosa, played the pilot on their prototype – but from the video below, it looks like the toy is exactly that – a toy. The gent with the RPS (my guess is his name is David Cann) seems to be potentially driving the RPS with his iPhone. Romina, who is an excellent actress and performer (you can see her portfolio site here) makes for an entertaining pilot.
I am not that impressed yet since it suffers from the same issues I have with many of the smaller RPS devices out there. Under four feet tall, the inverted pendulum is nice for some aspects of stability, but terrible for a static state and unlike the Anybots QB, it seems to have no third point for the resting state.
But people like commenting on it – so I include it for your amusement.
If Taptic Toys wishes to speak on the specs of their RPS, happy to clarify the details in this post. The website is simply a post of the same video – which has a poor audio quality.
Hi Sanford,
Thanks for posting! I’m the guy in the video.
You’re right, there’s no kick stand yet and it has a hard time staying in one spot when it’s windy outside. We aren’t sending motor encoder data back yet, but we will eventually, which should keep it stopped on a dime.
This prototype is short, but we’ll definitely make it taller in the next version.
I’m controlling it via Bluetooth in the video mainly because of the crowd and the traffic in the street… and it’s a prototype, so we wanted to be safe. The web browser remote control system is actually working, though.
It’s no excuse, but we’ve only spent two weeks on the project so far, so don’t write us off yet!
Thanks,
David
Dan – not a problem. Happy to see another player in the field and especially one from what seems like battlebot fiends as well. I am happy to follow up on your future advances as well.
Keep up the great work!
Thank you for your post! I see David has already cleared up some of the doubts ^.^
Yes – I would love to hear what has happened since.
The site at http://taptictoys.com/ seems to be dead. Too bad. I think this is a really great idea and I’ve been thinking about an iPad-based solution for a while. I tried using an iPad2 as a remote presence device and unfortunately it fell short, mostly due to audio issues. I blogged about my experience here: http://pivotallabs.com/users/joe/blog/articles/1676-ipad-2-as-a-remote-presence-device-
Their site is back up.