Fun and games with robots
Professor Rodney Brooks, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder of the lab's Humanoid Robotics Group, sees a future in which robotics plays an increasingly important role in our lives. No, not everyone will have a C-3PO-like personal assistant--at least not until 2010, when high-end robots like this may start showing up in the homes of well-heeled early adopters. The first robots will be about fun and games.
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 My Real Baby A joint project from Hasbro and iRobot |
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Brooks believes the first robots to establish a wide household presence will be robotic toys, such as the one he developed with two former M.I.T. colleagues and Hasbro called My Real Baby. The name pretty much says it all, and so does this eerily lifelike baby doll: She can laugh, cry, coo, burp, and make a variety of babble noises and words. She can even sense when her skin is being touched. One wonders if the kiddies will cuddle with her or run screaming.
By 2005, Brooks predicts many homes will have robot vacuums and other simple cleaning machines that, by then, will have dropped into the reasonable US$100 to $200 range. By 2010, he envisions easy-to-use plug-and-play robots in every home. Well, it's about time.
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 Rich Gold Manager of the RED lab at PARC |
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The writing is on the wall
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 Reading Eye Dog Photograph courtesy of Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre |
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Another of Gold's future-of-reading experiments is the Reading Wall, which is representative of the type of interactive exhibits that Gold believes will reenergize public spaces by 2010. The device's three 16-foot-long walls display text on the history of reading as a color plasma screen moves along the length of the wall, uncovering images and more specific historical information frame by frame.
