It looks like a fun workplace – very open and collaborative. I think I saw a few LEGOs in there too.

Video after the jump.

The SF Gate published an article on Pleo recently. In it, they reveal a few new details. For instance, Pleo will weight about 4 lbs. They also give us some help on the perplexing camera problem.

Using a camera installed in its nose, it sees and tracks faces and locations. It communicates with other Pleos through infrared technology — and it can even catch a cold.

That’s not quite as satisfying of an answer I’d like to hear, but at least it’s a start. You can also just barely see the hole in Pleo’s nose in the picture, where I believe the camera is.

They also say that Pleo comes, “with a rechargeable battery that lasts about three hours at a time.”

As far as the company goes, we now know,

… employs about a dozen people at its headquarters in Emeryville and an additional 10 at its research and development lab in Boise, Idaho, has raised $2.75 million in funding and is negotiating another round of venture capital.

[Via Robots and Artificial Intelligence Blog]

First off, Ugobe “officially” announced that it’s pushing back the relase date of Pleo untill March (hopefully).

Secondly, the stated reason is so that they can continue to make Pleo life-like and fluid in his motions.

At Ugobe, we are committed to making Pleo absolutely right. In pursuit of this goal, we have added upgrades to Pleo’s basic design (i.e. Pleo now has a camera, upgraded CPU and microprocessors, more powerful motors and quieter custom designed gears).

I added that bold. Yep. Looks like Pleo now has a camera! The question is, without having any external buttons or a hook-up to the internet, what’s he going to do with it?

They also announced they’re doing a market survey to collect more data. I’ve contacted Ugobe about linking to the survey on this site, so stay tuned if you didn’t get a link.

They survey asked a lot of questions about how we learned about Ugobe, and Pleo. Interestingly, there were also quite a few questions about whether we thought Pleo was more suited for a girl or a boy, and what age groups were the most appropriate. They also asked how much we thought we’d interact with Pleo (a few hours a day, a few minutes, none at all, etc.), and they asked what other life-forms we’d like to see Ugobe make.

All in all, I’m still pretty excited about Pleo. I’m very curious about the camera though. What do you think? I’m also a bit concerned about all the questions regarding age groups and gender markets – it makes me a bit concerned that Ugobe hasn’t really figured out who it’s targeting.

What do you think?

According to Valdez, Ugobe will begin taking preorders for Pleo on December 24th, and will continue to do so until Pleo is released on the world in early March. “Timing for product release has slipped a bit as we work to perfect Pleo”, says Valdez.

Online pre-orders will begin on December 24th and in early March, Pleo will start to arrive in the homes of consumers who placed online pre-orders. At the same time in early March, Pleo will make his debut on store shelves at select specialty retailers in limited locations.

Stay tuned for lots of great Pleo news coming out of this year’s CES, as Pleo will be featured in the CES Innovations Pod area.

In addition, Ugobe plans to take Pleo on tour in November.

PleoBot.com will be sure to keep you updated on locations and times.

Chung starts off by describing Ugobe’s vision, saying, “We are going after artifical life, and we hope our products create an emotional response in people.” He says that the reason for creating a new company is because industry is not set up to do such things right now. “Creating organic motion and coordinated gestures of moving all 14 motors at different degrees of speed and staying balanced at the same time was a breakthrough we were able to achieve.” Chung continues, “We can program this sort of thing in very little time – hours.” Bob Christopher says that Ugobe has invested over $1 million dollars in creating Pleo and that the toy industry wasn’t prepared to make that kind of investment – hence the new company.

John Sosoka describes the complexity of Pleo. “… there are clutches in the leg so that when the user starts torqueing on the leg, the internals don’t break. But we designed it so that Pleo knows when the leg is moving by an outside force, so he can cry out in pain.” Pleo also has a capacitive touch sensor under his skin to make touching him more lifelike – up until this point toys that featured “touch” only had buttons. Pleo also has high precision motors with high gearing and no backlash to make his motions as smooth and life-like as possible.

One example of Pleo’s lifelike behavior is his response to “lactic acid” code. “… when running all the motors in Pleo, the batteries wear out quickly. We had to write ‘lactic acid’ code to limit the current draw and have Pleo change behaviors and take a rest when the mtors are being inefficient due to current draw.” One of the practical examples of this is, “When Pleo walks, the carpet will drag on his feet. So his force feedback sensors will realizee that he is spending too much energy to walk around. Pleo will try different things to reduce the energy spent.”

Pleo will also come equipped with a SD slot that will allow users to edit his behavior and “adjust his age, hunger, fatigue and basic personality traits.” Christopher says, “We want to give the user the ability to change Pleo’s personality, animations and tricks. We also want to allow developers and hobbyists to take the SDK and motion system and behavior system and choreograph advanced features and animations for new AI functionality.”

Check out the Fall 2006 issue of ROBOT Magazine for the rest of the interview and tons of other great articles!

The only companies that I recognized on Shift’s client list were Oakley, WebTrends, and, of course, Ugobe.

Shift also has a corporate blog talking about all things PR and marketing. Check it out, PR Squared.

I’ve been covering the latest Pleo
news at PleoBot and I’ve been surprised to see the reaction to this video.

It’s been rather strong.

I was wondering if I could get some official word from you in response to this?

And here’s what Ugobe says:

My name is Khristine and I work with UGOBE on the PR front. UGOBE forwarded me your e-mail regarding the recent YouTube videos questioning Pleo’s legitimacy. We were all surprised to see this post and the reaction to it as well. In response, and on behalf of UGOBE, I want to let you know that both of the videos in the YouTube post were made for DEMO 2006.

The DEMO Conference offers all presenters exactly six minutes to demonstrate their new products before a live audience. Real working Pleo units will evolve over time by autonomously interacting with the environment, using true AI. But, the prototype version in this demonstration video is not a full working model and was meant to just give people a taste – in condensed form – of Pleo’s range of behaviors and movements.

In the YouTube posting, the video on the right was taped at the conference. The one on the left is simply a backup of the first.

There you have it: 1) Not the final version of Pleo and 2) Two different videos for the same presentation. Seems to make sense to me. Props to Ugobe for taking care of this so quickly.

Still any naysayers?

Check out the video below:

One one hand it probably wasn’t the best idea for Ugobe to use the exact same demo for both videos. On the other hand, they’re probably under a tremendous time crunch, and I can understand.

Regardless, they’ve created some negative PR especially coming off the heels of a nice big link off of Digg, only to have an even bigger link off of Digg to the video above!

So, is it a haox? I highly doubt it. It’s just a case of someone not thinking through things. Think about it. If you were doing a presentation in front of hundreds of people you’d want it very well scripted. Hopefully Ugobe will do something to prove it’s the real deal.

Ugobe, now’s your chance to avert a disaster.

In the interview they cover how Ugobe differes from WowWee, Ugobe’s laws of robotics, how they plan on creating emotional bonds between users and their products, and availability of SDKs.

We also learn that the product timeframe for Pleo is October or November, with definite shipments in time for Christmas. They also say that the complexity of the robot may be a problem. It’s very detailed and more complex than most things manufactured for a consumer market. They don’t want to cut corners, and they don’t want shortages.

Christopher also says that fine-tuning Pleo’s gearboxes took long hours of work to make them quiet and smooth. We all remember how noisy Furby was. Judging from the videos of Pleo, he’s virtually silent.

When discussing realism, Christopher says thta real-time reaction to events is key. The robot must be able to respond to noises or sights immediately. We expect this from real animals, and Pleo will emulate this.

On the difference between WowWee and Ugobe:

I think Wow Wee’s more focused on this feature-function experience, where you press the button and you make it mad, or press the button and there’s certain things that they can do. Ours is an autonomous feature, it’s actually thinking on its own, where you don’t need a remote control or a joystick to make it do anything.

WowWee’s robots don’t have real AI. It’s all response to direct input. Pleo can think on his own, according to Christopher.

It’s a great read and very informative. Excitement is mounting for Pleo!

The Pleo is not designed for teenagers, however. It doesn’t do the things teenage boys will want it to: fight. While you can train a Pleo to act somewhat aggressively, it’s no battle bot. For that, Christopher tells us to wait about 18 months, when a less expensive but “very cool” product will come into the market, aimed at the 18-year-old.

What could it be? Ninja robots?