Ugobe to be the "Pixar of Robotics"?
Posted on February 3rd, 2006 in Latest News
Caleb Chung, the creator of everyone’s favorite obnoxious furry robot pal, Furby, is helping start a new company that claims to revolutionize the robot toy industry. The new company, dubbed "Ugobe", which sounds vaguely like an African nation, is creating a lifelike pal that will, "… have certain personality characteristics. The toy will also adapt to its owner’s behavior." The company officials frequently refer to themselves as the "Pixar of robotics", in terms of how Pixar creates lifelike artificial beings.
"It
will respond to its owner," said Ugobe CEO Bob Christopher. "If the
owner is playful, the tech toy will become more playful. If the owner
is scared, it will become scared."
The toy will be released in September and will be debuted in Sharper Image stores. They’re also in negotiations with other stores.
On an interesting side-note, iRobot almost released their Roomba robots exclusively with Sharper Image, but backed out at the last minute. Had they done that, it’s almost guaranteed that they wouldn’t be as popular today. Let’s hope Ugobe doesn’t make the same mistake.
Frankly, what Ugobe is trying to do sounds a lot like what WowWee is already doing. Time will tell.
Tags: [ Robots | Ugobe | WowWee | Toys ]
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June 9th, 2008 at 21:16
This cute toy robot seems to be a reliable funny play mate. I am sure there are thousands of kids looking forward to buy it. I don’t know much about toy robot popularity but I hope they have a positive effect for kids. I am afraid my sun is too young for that, I guess [URL=http://www.3daymom.com/2007/07/10/toy-store-online/]wooden kids toys[/URL] would work better for him.