It’s an autonomous quad-copter created by the Robust Robotics Group at MIT. It hovers and flies a bit like the AR.Drone that had us smitten at CES this past January, but this one has a lot more brains. It response to natural (though slowly delivered) language voice commands that look to be processed on an iPhone before being sent to the helo. In the video embedded below you’ll see it responding to the command “Fly past room 124 then face the windows and go up.”
The Xachi Pet is produced by Taptic Toys, and is not yet in production. They expect it to cost $40 or less. It’s got an 8-bit speaker, an accelerometer, robotic legs that can dance, and a LED screen for animation. Similar to a Tomagachi, you track and maintain its hunger, thirst, health, and happiness from your iPod/iPhone – you can feed it, give it water and play with it to keep it happy. (via Xachi Pets fuse iPhones and Stuffed Animals into one Cute and Cuddly iToy
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Sketch-a-Move is a project by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. They actually did this a few years ago. It’s a concept for a toy car that allows you to explore the unique relationships between small surface doodles and actual physical movements. If you draw a circle on the top of the toy car, it will move in a circle. If you draw a complicated spiral, the car will move in a spiral. They don’t explain how it actually works or could work, but it sure looks like fun.
(via today and tomorrow)
