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Spykee wi-fi robot - first looks
I saw the Spykee robot at Costco and so I went home and researched what it was all about.
Then I decided to run back to Costco and pick one up before the US supply runs out. It was $229.99
Spykee was created by a French company, Meccano and is being distributed in the USA under the Erector brand. The robot has been available in the UK and Europe for some time - it was at one time called Spyke, but probably as a result of some trademark issues, now is called Spykee.
The basic idea is that the robot connects via wifi and therefore can be controlled either locally on the same wi-fi network, or remotely from any IP address. It’s sort of a remote-controlled webcam that you can drive around.
It’s supposedly a kid’s toy, but I’m not sure it’s going to be all that fun for kids, frankly. It’s very cool, and I hope to do some fun (and perhaps even interesting) stuff with it, but here are a few of my gripes:
- The building process is overall poor. The instructions are terrible. The fasteners that Meccano provide with it are really junk and awful for load bearing - I substituted my own nylon screws with nuts to end the thing falling apart at the slightest touch/bump.
- Meccano support sucks. Well actually, it just doesn’t exist at all. The toy doesn’t come with a CD or printed manuals. You have to download them. But the catch is that Meccano doesn’t seem to know how to operate either a web server or a mail server. Their web server takes users to the UK site with no links back to the US site, for reference, you can get to the US site by manually entering this address in your browser: http://www.spykeeworld.com/US/
- As I note, they can’t run a mail server either, apparently, because mail to the address they list for support bounces (and it has been this way for a long time, according to forums around the net).
- The robot looks like it has arms that move, but the entire body of the robot is just a frame to hold the webcam. It serves no function and doesn’t do anything (cannot be moved via remote control). The “active” parts of the robot are the base with the tracks and CPU etc. and the webcam “module” which also houses the LED light and microphone. The rest of it is inanimate, just for show.
- The Spykee is not very autonomous. It only does things while one is connected to it from the “console” software. You can’t activate a function, then log out, and expect it to do anything (like act as a surveillance camera).
- There is no web interface - the only way to connect to the robot and interact with it is to use a specific binary application (Mac and Windows supported). So that app has to be installed on any computer you want to use to interact with Spykee and those computers have to be a Mac or Windows PC (i.e. no iPhone or othe such).
- The name has the word “Spy” in it, but Spykee is not very stealthy. It’s not going to sneak up on anybody (It’s LOUD).
- You can theoretically talk beween the remote PC and somebody near the robot, but it doesn’t work very well, at least not on the Mac version. It has horrible delay and no echo handling, so is near useless. If you mute the mic on the PC side, you can use this feature to listen to sounds near the robot, but it’s hard to interact.
- The manual says the software is “open source” but it is nowhere to be found (people keep saying it will be released, but there’s no dates anywhere that I’ve found).
There’s a good YouTube video out there listing some of the above and a few other criticisms here.
I got Spykee because it supports the Mac. The other wifi robot, Rovio, only works with Windows.
I haven’t done anything with the Spykee yet except the “officially supported” things, which are actually pretty cool, but limiting. I want to connect to the device directly with my own software, with web services etc. Unfortunately, the protocols are not released, nor is the supposed “open source software”, so this will require hardcore reverse engineering. I haven’t spent any time on that yet, so I can’t provide any details yet.
In getting the remote control mode to work, you setup a name/password for your robot on SpykeeWorld.com and then connect from a remote place using that name. One thing I found out is that this name/password must be simple letters with no spaces or other punctuation. It will let you set a name with these characters, but when you try to connect, it won’t work (and the diagnostic “recipient not available” is not helpful). I have been able to use the remote access (from outside on the Internet to the robot behind a NAT/firewall) with the robot sitting behind many different makes and models of firewalls and routers, and I even tried two layers of firewalls and that worked too, which surprised me. I’m not sure yet how it gets through the NAT/firewall.
Like I said, I rushed out and bought it because I didn’t want to miss this wave of US shipments, but before you do the same thing, you might want to be aware of the above caveats.
Roku Netflix Player
Well, I was going to get one of these, but now I see that it doesn’t have an interface for searching and selecting movies. You have to first log into your Netflix account and add the movie to your queue using your computer. The Roku Netflix Player only allows you to browse titles in your Netflix Instant Queue.
The other problem for me is the lack of buffer (the player only has 256MB of RAM) and reports of barely passable video quality (due to bandwidth limitations). Roku recommends a minimum 1.5Mbps connection; movies average a bit-rate of 2.2Mbps.
Macworld said:
I found the image quality underwhelming… the image looked flat, with muted colors. Some standard def content was downright blurry: the opening credits for some films and television shows were difficult to read
Now that I’ve got HDTV over satellite, the last thing I want to do is step backwards to something less than standard 480p DVD.
I’d rather wait a little while for a higher quality bitrate video to download than suffer poor video quality if my connection can’t keep up in real-time - especially for HD content (the Roku doesn’t support HD yet, but is supposed to in the future). So that means a box with a lot more RAM (or flash, or a small hard disk), which probably means it will cost more than $99.
Videoconferencing predictions past and present
This week we’ve seen many references to “recently released” research suggesting that videoconferencing may finally be ready to take off.
Videoconferencing – a much talked about, but seldom-used technology – may finally be earning its spurs within the enterprise.
85 per cent of respondents polled either use or plan to use video conferencing.
Forty one per cent of those questioned are also using, or investigating the use of so-called telepresence
But here’s the thing: We’ve seen this before. For example:
“Videoconferencing gains momentum”
Jul 18, 2007“Video Conferencing Gains Ground”
Sep 17, 2007“Videoconferencing is likely to gain momentum”
Apr 4, 2007“Videoconferencing Gains Momentum”
Sep 7, 2001
Despite years of false starts and unfulfilled promises, here we go again. Whether we are talking one year ago, seven years ago, or 25 years ago, the theme is always the same. It goes like this: “while we acknowledge that videoconferencing has never met adoption expectations in the past, we believe that is because of INSERT EXCUSE HERE and with our new INSERT WIZBANG TECHNOLOGY DIFFERENCE HERE we are sure adoption will explode this time.”
Hint - it’s not a technology problem.
Execs provide (more) excuses for why users aren’t interested in video-calling
Continuing in my recent theme regarding the dead end that is talking-heads video-calls, we find the VP of Nokia’s Nseries speaking in Barcelona attempting to explain why customer’s haven’t embraced the feature even though it has been available since 2005. According to techdigest.tv in Customers didn’t embrace video-calling as they’re vain Nokia’s exec said:
Users “aren’t interested” in video-calling, mainly because they find the angle a handset must be held at for the best quality video-call “isn’t very flattering”.
UPDATE: in short, he was saying people don’t use videoconferencing because it makes them look fat. How funny to read this today, since this is exactly what I said just a couple of weeks ago as my top two reasons why talking-heads video-calling will never take off:
- real people are not attractive - we are not movie stars or models. people on TV are not normal. we are not used to seeing normal people on “TV” (in the form of real-time video).
- we are not directors. we do not know how to properly produce video content, how to light it, frame it etc
Other excuses given by Nokia for why video-calling hasn’t been embraced included:
“[The technology] hit the market too early”
“There wasn’t enough support from carriers”
“The marketing push wasn’t big enough”
We have seen this all before. Video-calling has repeatedly failed to meet expectations. And each time we see the experts grasping at straws as to why. Comments like “maybe it will still be a success” from Nokia’s Sari Ståhlberg suggest that we’re sure to see it repeat again. Instead of learning, they believe their own spin and use the excuses like the above to throw more good money after bad on this fundamentally broken idea - video-calling is a classic case of a “solution in search of a problem”. It’s irresistibly cool - unfortunately, it’s a money sink without a market
Sluggish sales for Blu-Ray DVD
Even now that the Hi-def DVD format wars are over and Blue-Ray has won, sales of the new DVD players are still sluggish. Previously, the slow sales were blamed on the assumption that consumers were waiting to see which format would dominate (survive). Now, the “experts” are finding new excuses and believe the interest will surge in another year or two.
ABI Research analyst Steve Wilson said it is just as well for consumers if they don’t jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon yet. Wilson said he expects Blu-ray players to drop to $250 by this holiday season and $200 by the end of 2009. That’s when he expects mainstream adoption of the movie format to catch on.
I wonder. Or perhaps I just flat doubt it. I think people are sick of hard media and if some kind of IP-based on-demand service, such as Apple TV, can deliver Hi-def movies and other content with sufficient quality and reliability, DVD players will be a thing of the past entirely. Heck, it might even spell the end of expensive cable and satellite TV packages where, instead, people subscribe to just a basic TV package for news and other local channels/content and use on-demand (perhaps over IP) for everything else.
FYI: Telepresence is not “new”
Cisco is pushing Telepresence hard as “the next big thing” and a lot of people are buying into the hype and referring to it in language like “new” and “next generation” technology.
I have news for you. Telepresence has been around for decades, at least in research circles. It used to be called Videoconferencing and it is usually justified on the basis of increased productivity or cost-cutting as a direct result of a presumed reduction in travel. Except it turns out it doesn’t achieve those benefits.
And it’s not because the implementations haven’t been good. There have been some magnificent systems put together (at incredible cost), with high quality video, multiple cameras, synchronized whiteboards, and all sorts of cool hardware and features.
We see solutions claiming to provide technology that substitutes for face-to-face communication come up over and over. However, no one seems to ever stop and look at the facts, the research already done, the long history of failure in past attempts, etc. It seems we are doomed to repeat this history forever. Its too compelling - intuitively we know it must work.
But it doesn’t. I mean the technology works wonderfully - but it doesn’t achieve the stated goals of increasing productivity or reducing travel expenses. I’ll make this part one and end here, continuing this theme tomorrow.
