Date: 2009-06-09 04:36:12 Created: 2009-02-15 08:58:42
This is Gob, my very own pleo.
A pleo is a robot dinosaur made by a company called Ugobe. It's basically a robot pet with a developing personality and plenty of hacking/development possibilities for those who feel so inclined. Its battery pack lasts for about an hour and it normally costs about 3000 crowns. I got Gob from Toys'r'us, on February 10 2009, after a friend informed me they were sold for just 995 crowns in all the chain's stores.
I had wanted a well made "pet-like" robot at least since I first saw the Fifth element, so picking up a pleo at that price didn't take much thought at all. Especially not when the hacking options were considered. But let's take one thing at a time ...
A pleo is basically independent and supposed to decide on its own what it feels like doing, but you can control it quite a bit by using certain interactions. A pleo has quite a few sensors, both for touch, sound and visual. So, it knows when it's being touched in different areas, when it's being carried or turned upside down, and it can avoid walking off edges.
Yes, I think it does. A pleo really feels like some odd kind of pet, despite all its little motor sounds. It doesn't take long before you find yourself talking to it without any sign of embarassment.
Pleo feels very solidly and thoughtfully made too, really like a luxury toy. The box is nice and large to start with, and everything's well packed and clearly explained. The pleo itself is solid, with a well-painted/dyed soft rubber skin over its plastic and metal innards. I think the fact that the skin is loose does a lot, it folds and stretches naturally as your pleo moves around, and if you hold it you feel parts moving under the surface not unlike muscles under skin.
For my part I'd find it fun if Gob walked around more on his own, unless I incline him to move he tends to stay pretty much in one place.
... then again, perhaps he will start moving around more on his own since I encourage that ... We'll see! The fact that each pleo develops its own unique personality and keeps learning through its life is heavily pushed for by Ugobe, so hopefully that's the case.
Gob just pushed my DS game case off the desk, possibly a sign of evolving, forming a mind of its own or both. Or perhaps just not being able to notice smaller objects its pushing ahead when moving. Gob's sensors warned of the edge, so he stopped before the DS itself went over.
You pet it. You watch it shuffle over your desk or floor and stumble upon things. You let it chew on things, pick it up and cuddle it to sleep. You see how it enjoys your touch and start humming happily when you scratch its chin.
Also, at least some of us soon start thinking about what may be inside and how you may be able to make use of the insides in fun new ways.
Ugobe has been extremely encouraging to people who want to hack their pleos, whether creating new little movements for it or accessing its internal systems to make use of the sensors or completely reprogram it. They've delivered some documentation on how the insides work and have promised a full software development kit in the future. Unfortunately the whole state of Ugobe seems a little uncertain right now (see below), but there are several tools by third parties out for modifying or otherwise accessing the insides of your pleo. Dino-mite is the one which stood out to me though. It's a Windows application (and a pretty ugly one too) which lets you connect to your pleo by USB and pretty much access all of its internal functions. Ugobe's commitment to encouraging hacking shows in that Dino-mite just needed to provide the interface, all the functions and commands are there and fully accessible from the start. No jailbreaking needed here.
(You can apparantly connect to a pleo using any terminal software, Dino-mite just has some convenient help and windows.)
Anyway, it's a good idea to know what you are doing before you enter your pleo and, for example, begin to take photos using his builtin camera.
I know, because I had an idea what I was doing and still managed to screw up pretty well.
The thing is this: a pleo has a small onboard memory which is pretty full of its operating system and personality. You don't want to put anything else in that memory or it will fill up all of a sudden and your pleo might get really sad and need a few firmware upgrades and downgrades to come back to life again. A pleo also accepts a SD memory card, and that's where you want to make very sure any photos you take using Dino-mite are saved.
What I did was take a few photos, saving them to on-board memory because I hadn't ensured my SD card was inserted and detected. Then Gob suddenly wouldn't start up, seemingly on account of his personality files being broken. It took me downgrading to the 1.0.2 firmware and then upgrading to 1.1 again for him to come back to life, and when he did all personality evolution was lost and Gob restarted as if he'd just come out of the box.
Unfortunately, the future of Ugobe and pleo seems a little bit uncertain. Ugobe has been downsizing, moved its servers to cheaper hosting (causing outages which mean the official forums are still offline, two months or so later) and generally not said much at all for the past few months. While it doesn't have any serious effect on the enjoyment you get out of a single pleo, it would definitely be sad to see the official supporting company go out of business. A surprising number of people I've talked to after I got Gob had already heard of it, and one of them went right out and bought one himself after I told him about the current price. So there is word of mouth, and people love seeing one.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ugobe went away, but the world would be a notably less fun and creative place if they did.
Go out and get a pleo - make my non-surprise never happen!
Oh darn, it happened, Ugobe has shut down. I just can't stop hoping for development tools to somehow leak out into the wild somehow, some day, but I won't believe it until I see it.
Here's to the hope that everyone who made pleo what it is goes on to new, great and successful things.
Yay, the company which manufactured pleos for Ugobe have bought all the assets and are going to bring pleo back in production again. Hope for a development kit is not dead yet!
