Keepon

I saw this last night on a Japanese TV show. Apparently, a U.S. and Japanese researcher have been working on a little robot called "keepon", experimenting with human interaction. Here is a short movie demonstrating some basic emotive interaction:


The American researcher filmed a demo video of the little robot responding to a song by a L.A. band called "Spoon" and uploaded it to YouTube:


Apparently, the video was so popular that the band caught notice and contacted the researchers about using the robot in one of their official music videos. The Japanese researcher appears in the video with the robot (the video was filmed in Tokyo):


Like probably just about everyone else who has seen the video, I checked to see if I could buy one. You can't.

Update 2007/09/04 1:30am (JST):

As with everything else you can think of, Wikipedia already has an entry about Keepon. Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing anything. You could replace my entire blog with nothing but links to Wikipedia articles. :)