I met the double guys at an event earlier in the summer. They had just been accepted into YC and had brought one of their original prototypes to the party and were driving it around.
It was a prototype, with a rough cut aluminum skeleton and questionable balance, but it was still a goddamn iPad segway, and they were driving it around a crowded space talking to people through the camera. It was awesome.
I can't speak to how big the telepresence market is, or how the price point compares, but I wish these guys the best of luck, because while I'm sitting at my desk coding another web application, these guys are building freaking robots.
The quality of companies in this batch of YC is mind blowing. I know PG says the quality increases with each batch, but from what I've seen thus far, YC S12 seems noticeably more impressive.
Thankfully they surely cannot weigh that much. I wonder what they would do if people got in the habit of picking them up and moving them out of the way.
Until recently you could do it on the Anybots website. It's like a video call mixed with an R/C robot: you can really explore spaces and interact with people.
However, talking with a telepresence robot from the other side is a completely different experience. You get a terrific sense of being with another entity. It's fantastic.
Given the huge need for engineers in SV, I'm curious as to how well one of these robots would allow someone remotely to participate in our team's day-to-day interactions. Particularly pair programming..
I'm not $2,000+ curious, but still has me wondering..
And why that would be better to use a strange moving machine rather than usual video conferencing that only requires a monitor/projector and simple camera.
Last Friday I used the Double to sit at the lunch table with the team in San Francisco (I'm in New York). Lunch is not something the team is inclined to open up a regular videocon session on, but lunch conversation is something I miss out a lot on from working remotely. People talk about stuff (work and non work related) a lot more candidly at the lunch table than in conference rooms. There were a lot of nervous giggles and "that's creepy" remarks but I think its just about getting used to the form.
>Double recharges to full capacity in about 2 hours with the provided AC to DC wall adapter.
So someone at the physical location has to plug the robot back in to charge? Doesn't it make more sense to have a docking station so that you can simply drive the robot into a position where it can charge itself?
Yeah the lack of a story for how to charge the thing without someone nearby is a deal breaker for a lot of use cases. If they sort that out reasonably I can see a few places I've worked at picking up some of these for remote teams.
I've preordered one, and am looking forward to ordering more.
As a longtime follower of this space, this price point enables many more possibilities than previous robots, and using off-the-shelf computing hardware is the right solution.
Love that so many startups are looking at hardware innovation - like this, Square, Ouya, Pebble etc. Even if this isn't a mass-market product in it's own right - only good things can come from building it.
Agree about the art-gallery use case, and as a guy that has been involved in a lot of product companies I think it's important that the initial demo videos show solutions to real problems.
If your initial launch marketing positions the unit as some esoteric solution to a non-problem (especially if it's for a "rich persons" non-problem), people seem more apt to forget about the product overall. Show some demo videos of it being used for REAL applications, and there is a greater chance people will remember it and/or aspire to wanting one (which helps keep you stuck in their subconscious). Nobody is going to go to work and say "did you hear about that robot you can use to browse art galleries remotely?", but they will say "did you hear about that robot that you can use to go grocery shopping?" (or something similar, I don't have a better example because I can't really think of a good use for a telepresence robot, but that's just me).
It was a prototype, with a rough cut aluminum skeleton and questionable balance, but it was still a goddamn iPad segway, and they were driving it around a crowded space talking to people through the camera. It was awesome.
I can't speak to how big the telepresence market is, or how the price point compares, but I wish these guys the best of luck, because while I'm sitting at my desk coding another web application, these guys are building freaking robots.