Pleo Creates Suspension of Disbelief
Here’s an interesting article for Rafe Needleman about Ugobe’s strategy and how the key to life-like robots is, “suspension of disbelief.” He writes,
The trick to making a robot, Ugobe CEO Bob Christopher tells me, is that you have to make it lifelike enough to engender a “suspension of disbelief” in its user, so that the user treats it as living. Once that bridge is crossed, people will start to attribute to the robot a personality, and skills, that it probably doesn’t have.
Part of this suspension of disbelief revolve around Ugobe’s three laws of robotics:
- Life-form must feel and convey emotion
- Life-form must be aware of its environment and itself.
- Life-form must evolve and grow over time
With a $200 price target, Ugobe expects Pleo to engage its owners for, “two to five years.”
After Pleo, what’s Ugobe going to do?
After the first product comes out, Ugobe is interested in making products that are brand extensions of the current popular artificial life forms: characters in computer games.
