interaction design

Finally a research at the Soon Chung Yang University (Korea) finally implemented a long dream of us, the merger of a mobile phone with a robot. The robot finds its powerstation by itself and automatically drives to the call receiver. It also can indicate whether a nice or a mean person is calling – through “pleasant and unpleasant motion patterns”. (Video here, Thanks Andre)

There are lots of earlier studies about bringing robots and gadgets together. Here two my favorites:

CLOCKY (earlier report) by Gauri Nanda from the MIT is an alarm clock “for people who have trouble getting out of bed”, which runs away, when it starts ringing.

The concept phone Nokia 888 is a shape-changing phone: it can communicate its status by changing shapes, but also two owners of the 888 can send shapes to each other, as e.g. heart shapes.