Glittery, Shiny and Highly Distracting.

(press pic- well lit and soft)

About a week ago Anselm bought me another Robot Magazine. (This is how you know someone really loves you BTW) I read it cover to cover and ran across something that made me spin in circles with excitement. I found an article on Pleo’s and decided I must have one.

Now cute dinosaurs are not what I would build if I could actually build a robot for myself. Birds, Bats, Cats, or gnomes come to mind before “cute” dinosaurs. Doesn’t matter. I had to have one. Anselm and I ordered it after about an hour of conversation on the matter. Key points to winning this were: Your son will love it. Your girlfriend will be VERY well behaved. Robots are the future….Don’t you care about the FUTURE? Lots of alcohol and hugs helped too.

(pleo up close and personal!)

“Matilda” cost 350.00 plus shipping/handling and arrived last night. She was tired out I guess since her batteries needed charging and she slept all night long. This morning we all woke up extra early to check her out. You can tell by the flurry of flickr photos that it was pretty fun actually. She does whine like a robot—lots of whirring and wheezing sounds (conveniently absent from the website soundtrack of a pleo).

Most interesting thing so far that Matilda has done is really open my eyes to the future of robotics yet again. There is for all intents and purposes, nothing about the toy that creates a real suspension of disbelief for me…..yet. But that oddly has no bearing on whether or not I LIKE the toy. Which I whole-heartedly do.

Matilda was made by Ugobe which appears to be an interesting company created by Furby inventor Caleb Chung to market the Pleo robot dinosaur. The name is not so bad till you read the bit about what it is comprised of which makes it too cheesy for me. From their site: ...”Inspired by its dream, the group coined the word ‘UGOBE’, which translates to: “You! Go and be!” a creative reworking of Descarte’s “Cogito ergo sum”-”I think, therefore I am.”

Meh. I can live without that one.

Hopefully my new pleo is just one robot in a long line of robots to be that I will get to try out. I am excited to see what this company decides to do next. I am pretty impressed with the social networking aspects of the pleo site to be honest. There is a lot of room for people to explore and share their experiences with this little robot and it is hands down the best way to market this product.