Now’s the time when a lot of people are stuck at home. They’re bored. They’re out of their wits. They’re probably playing video games to pass the time — and yet, something’s missing. If only they had a fluffy robot companion that would hang out and cheer them on using “biological sensors” and “event detection” units.
If only.
Well, those dreams may one day become reality according to a recently published Sony patent outlining the creation of an advanced gaming robot “friend.”
And it looks, well, fluffier than you’d probably expect.
“This object is a human-type robot…and includes a speaker for outputting audio, a microphone for inputting audio of the outside world, and a drive mechanism that includes a motor for moving each joint or a link for connecting the motors, etc. The robot…preferably has an interactive function to talk with the user, and more preferably has an autonomous movement function.”
The illustration there is apparently just an “example” of what it could potentially look like, so try not to get too excited.
As Business Insider highlighted earlier this month, the patent goes into a great amount of detail on how the robot buddy would operate. Specifically, it would use a number of sensors, including cameras, “biological sensors,” motion detectors and microphones to gauge a human’s emotions and reactions while playing video games.
“The feeling deduction unit…deduces the user’s feeling on the basis of the outputs of various sensors and data from an external server. The feeling deduction…deduces the user’s feeling by deriving an evaluation value for each of feeling indexes such as joy, anger, love, and surprise. “
According to the patent, Sony feels having the robot around would not only increase a user’s “motivation for playing a game,” it’d also make movies and television more enjoyable to watch.
But I suppose that depends on how comfortable you are with a fluffy robot constantly monitoring your biological signals in order to react effectively to motivate you to keep playing your sparkly new Playstation 5.
Forever.
Now, if we could somehow combine Sony’s robot friend here with this high five apparatus, we might just have something worthwhile.
