原创 I like those robotic balls!

One product really caught my attention at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)—the smart robotic balls.

Quite apart from anything else, I had to laugh when the young lady interviewer (Click here to see the video) asked the developer "Are you the man with the balls?"

Apparently, the folks who create these have been waffling on about them since last year, but they are just now poised to start shipping the little rascals (sometime this month I believe).
If you visit the creators' website at www.gosphero.com, you will see that this is actually a really clever idea. It's conceptually very simple, but I bet it was tricky to implement.

The idea is that you have a sphere the size of a baseball that contains motors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, multi-colored LEDs capable of producing thousands of colors, some sort of control system, and a battery (the battery is charged up using some form of induction system and the ball is said to run for about one hour on a full charge).

The clever thing is that when it comes to controlling the little scamp, you can use a smart phone (iPhone, Android) or a tablet computer (iPad, Android) equipped with WiFi, which gives you an effective distance of up to 50 feet (give or take).

So what can you do with these little ragamuffins? Well, first of all you can have a lot of fun with them. Imagine leaving one sitting on the floor until a passerby reaches down for it and – just before their fingers touch it – it rolls out of reach (I understand you can achieve speeds of up to three feet a second). I don't know about you, but this application on its own could keep me amused for hours or days (probably weeks or months). And how about chasing your pets around the house? Again, this could keep me entertained for ages.

If you were lucky enough to own a couple of these little scallywags, you could have races with your friends (they look pretty good in dim light each glowing with a different color [the robot balls, not your friends]).

Also, there's an open SDK (Software Developer's Kit), which allows you to create your own applications. Apart from anything else, this concept is so open-ended that it can "spark" all sorts of ideas. With regard to simply making the ball roll around the floor, for example, one scenario is reasonably obvious (tilting the controller causes the ball to roll in that direction, and the amount of tilt controls the speed of the ball). But if you visit the Apps page on the GoSphero site, you'll see an app called Sphero Draw N'Drive in which you use your finger to trace a path on your phone/tablet's screen and the ball then replicates this track in the real world. Just seeing this app made me wonder how many other ways there would be to control these little rapscallions.

Sad to relate, these little beauties are a tad expensive at $129.99 (plus shipping), but maybe the price will fall over time. In the meantime I will content myself by watching the videos on YouTube and pondering the tricks I could play...