[Freddy]

No, it's not a gigantic robot from outerspace, that has for no apparent reason taken a dislike to and launched a melee attack on Japan.

This guy only loosely fits the humanoid description, at least if your thinking of Seven of Nine.? The friendly (we hope) chap or chapess is named Wakamaru, is yellow and looks a lot like a modern hoover with arms.? Perhaps this isn't the technological advance that was hoped for considering the human-like robot shown at the Japan Expo a few months ago, but it is set for lauch in the coming month, and will probably enter a few homes.? Technologically, it doesn't really add much to anything that a PC can already do - face recognition, chatting and surveillance are not new to us, so the only real change is that someone has put it inside something vaguely human shaped.

I wonder how useful then, this will prove to be, will people justify the extra expense for a new gadget that does the same things as a PC does already ?? It's not new to Japan of course, we've seen plenty of these kind of robots over the past few years, the most succesful was probably the robotic lawnmower, but I can't help thinking about whether it will suffer from the same problems the Daleks experienced getting up the stairs...


Freddy.

This news was gleaned from : The Boston Herald