Photos: Oddities at Digital LIfe

Albo and I took in the sights and sounds of Digital Life yesterday, most of which were distinctly robotic in nature. Turns out that the "digital life" they speak of is not so much a commentary the high tech aspects of our daily lives, but refers to actual free-will evolving digital life forms. This is a robo-world, folks, we just live in it. We'll have video of our Digital Life highlights soon (Update: here and here it is), but for now enjoy some of the stranger moments of the expo.

At the iRobot keynote address, typical human opinions on robots were projected onscreen...

Roomba is not impressed by our illogical natterings.

Roomba eradicates dissent with the same ruthless efficiently it applies when ridding the world of fluff and dander.

But Roombas are old news. The real excitement came when Colin Angle of iRobot introduced a new member of their pizza-shaped robot family, the ConnectR. The ConnectR may look like a bedpan...
...but is in fact a stay-at-home proxy of you. That's right, you yourself, dear reader. It's a set of remote controlled eyes and ears within your home, for when you're away on business but would still like to get some quality time in with the childrens. Gaze on this photo, workaholics of America, and witness your future!
This little guy can move, tilt it's single unblinking electronic eye 360 degrees, and transmit your voice to your only slightly unsettled family. It's called controlled with your personal computer via a private network. But what the above photo doesn't show is the mess your robot surrogate makes when it sails across the Monopoly board to try to push it's piece to Marvin's Gardens. "Daaaad!"
Not that I don't see the appeal of this "Virtual Visiting Robot". I've got a baby half-sister in California, and here I am on the other side of the country in New York. It would be great to have a real, concrete presence in her every day life, even if that presence had to be slightly scary and electronic. But the idea that the baby would grow up believing that a talking plastic hubcap was her actual sister gives me pause. Still, it's kidna cute, right?

Hewlett Packard's Keynote address lacked robots and was therefore pretty dull, despite the fact that VP Phil McKinney was rocking the dressed down Steve Jobs look. The part that got my attention was when Phil screened this old highly speculative game demo for HP's Mscape technology, and mentioned that some cynics on Digg thought the video's proposed application of technology was a tad unbelievable.

Then, as if to silence those doubting Thomases once and for all, Phil whipped out what he said was the actual magical gadget that will at last allow us to see through the matrix of the real world, and will make us all heroes in a never-ending video game as big as the entire earth.
Or maybe it was just a little rectangular piece of plastic the boys in marketing whipped up. Either way, McKinney did not go so far as to claim the thing worked like in the video, or would be produced as an HP product, or was not a PSP with a orange sticker over the screen.

Finally, Gateway introduced their new line of computers that look like giant iPods, but not before serving a basketful of these alarming muffins...
For more in-depth coverage of the coolest tech at Digital Life, check out our video features on the Novint Falcon (an awesome "force feedback" game controller) and our old friend the ConnectR.