Plus vraies que nature, ces peluches parlent, bougent la bouche, clignent des yeux… Le “vraie” peluche parfaite pour tous les enfants!

Il existe plusieurs animaux: le lion, le panda, le koala, l’ours, le tigre…
L’entreprise WowWee, crée à la base des robots. Elle a utilisé ses savoirs pour en faire des peluches.

Voici une vidéo, en anglais, qui vous permettra de voir tout ce qu’elle peut faire:

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Pizzas, Ghosts and Robots, all making augmented reality news this week:

• Ghostwire, the award winning game for the Symbian OS, is now coming to Nintendo DSi.
• Toy maker WowWee (the guys behind the Robosapien) planned to introduce a robotic augmented reality game where you drive the robot through an augmented environment. Alas “they thought it might be too complex for the average consumer to understand and enjoy.
• The Wall Street Journal on augmented reality (subscription required): “Madison Avenue Flirts With 3-D“. On the same note, here’s an article from Fast Company I missed last month, “When ‘Mad Men’ Meets Augmented Reality“.
• AdLab scans through seven augmented reality mini-sites (the usual suspects, GE’s smart grid and Nissan’s good decision included). Their verdict – “it’s jaw-dropping only the first time you see it. After that it quickly regresses from neat to meh”. Read the article for seven other discussion points.
• The inescapable, Papa Johns virtual road trip, where you can place a greasy pizza box in front of your web-cam, and drive a virtual Camaro. I had the honor of tweeting about it before the site was online.

Quote of the week comes from that WSJ article:

Madison Avenue has high hopes for the gimmick. “It’s the new bright and shiny object that marketers want,” says Tom Bedecarre, chief executive of AKQA, a San Francisco digital marketing firm that created the Postal Service campaign. AKQA is currently pitching several of its clients’ campaigns that include the technology.

Which means we should expect more bad novelty augmented reality ahead.

And to start off the coming week, here’s a nice clip showing projected pong game, made by two students from the IT University of Copenhagen. Here you can find out how they did it, and see some behind the scenes pictures.

We finally got to the theater to see the movie Earth…. with my keys firmly in my hot little hand.  The movie was not what I expected, but the photography was amazing.  My four year old nephew was with his family, who was with us, and he made it quite entertaining, as most four year olds would.  His mother and I thought the chase scenes and shark-eating-seal scenes might be a bit to dramatic for him.  Not so.  We looked over at him as a cheetah caught a deer and his eyes were as big as saucers and he said under his breath, to no one in particular, “Awwwwwesooooome!”  So much for the timid little, soft-hearted four year old.

The boys said that they would rather see another movie.  Homeschool mom said, “This is school.  We can stay home and do more math, or go see Earth.”  They decided Earth was now viewer worthy.  A friend on facebook suggested X-men instead of Earth.  I explained that this was SCHOOL.  He suggested I call it Culinary Arts….  oh boy.

I’m looking forward to the flick UP!  It looks hilarious and Pixar always puts on a really good shew.

This drawing started as a sketch of a pose of my WowWee Tri-bot toy robot. After I had inked this pencil sketch with a Micron, I scanned it, and changed it considerably in an image editor. I also filled it with color.

It is a very rough sketch, but the proportions are more or less correct.

That is all.

iRobot Roomba 530 Robotic Vacuum with Virtual Wall � Woot by Wootbot on April 23, 2009 at 12:00 AM. Meet the Floormasters. Hey, that

Yesterday, after I published my post about drawing the WowWee Tri-bot blind, I drew four additional blind drawings of the robot, this time from different perspectives.

Then this morning, I decided to continue this exercise with two new blind drawings.

After I made several blind drawings of robot poses, I decided to test if I’m already able to draw the robot in a sketch.

I was most concerned about the right proportions. That was what I was doing wrong until then, and why I was doing the blind drawings in the first place.

Here is a photo of the same pose, to check if I did it right.

Clearly, there is still a lot of work to be done. The proportions are much better than before, but the details and exact shape of the part are not very well defined –to put it diplomatically. Ah well, it is an improvement over earlier drawings I did of this toy robot, as you can judge for yourself below.

It is clear to me that I’m slowly getting better at it, and that concentration is an essential part of drawing. You need to be obsessed with your subject to even have a slim chance of drawing it in the correct proportions and giving it the treatment it deserves. In other words, you need to be a drawing geek to be able to make a drawing that resembles the original.

The interesting part of drawing, and what still bugs me at this moment, is that the shapes and lines are highly dependent on each other. With that I mean that the whole drawing depends on how you draw your lines and where you draw then. Not only that, but when you come back to something you drew earlier in the same drawing, and compare it with your subject, you realize that you have to make it very clear what you draw at the moment you are drawing something from observation. So more than anything else, you must draw in such a way that it is always clear what you’ve drawn. If you don’t and are less precise at some point, you will get confused when you revisit parts of a drawing you drew earlier.

Drawing is not only communicating through visuals what you have observed, but also communicating to yourself while drawing, so you don’t  have to remember everything you’ve done before. Because if you have to go back in memory, you will get confused, because past and present get tangled up, and you start making things up, to compensate for a temporary loss of coherence. To produce a drawing that is clear to  others, you first need to learn to be clear to yourself, every step of the way.

No messy approximations, but clear statements in lines. That is the goal I’m trying to reach.

By the way, did you notice I started with the head, and that I had to correct the head shape as the last step? This prompted me to the statement that you need to draw with intent and high concentration at every point of the process. Never let your guard down, because you will regret it later on. Stay focused and relaxed.

That is all.

I thought a difficult to draw shape would be good to sharpen my blind drawing skills. I have this toy robot, called Tri-bot, made by WowWee. I can put his arms and body in all kinds of positions, which makes him a kind of mannequin for drawing.

I gave myself 10 chances to draw, and needed 35 minutes to do it (3.5 minutes per outline). Here are the drawings, 1 through 10.

Here is a snapshot of the pose I took after I was done drawing.

Strangely enough, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. Only, it is a lot of work to do it, and a bit monotonous. However, I didn’t really notice that, because sketching the outline was taking all my concentration, so I had no time to think such thoughts.

That is all.

Es el último robot epía. Se llama WowWee SpyBall, un invento con forma de esfera que incluye una cámara y conectividad WiFi. El invento es capaz de capturar imagen y sonido para luego retransmitirlos a través de Internet.

Lo cómodo de este sistema, es que podemos enviar nuestras órdenes a la SpyBall a través del teléfono móvil, ordenador o videoconsola para que se mueva y revise todas las habitaciones de la casa.

Now I was thinking this drawing wasn’t any good, but I was mistaken. There are some good things in this drawing.

Only I’m missing something here. While the sketches of the Tri-bot become more accurate with every version, they also become less spontaneous. I need to put more distance between me and the robot toy, otherwise I’ll become too technical and my artistry will suffer.

That is all.

So, this is my first drawing since I’m awake, and hopefully not my last. I stopped drawing once I realized the head is too large in comparison to the wheels.

Getting the proportions right is hard. However, I got some insight from this drawing. When sketching the wheel on the left, I saw it formed in my mind before I drew it. I got a three-dimensional “flash of foresight” how it would look on paper before I drew it.

So, that is what this “holding in memory” is all about. I have to delve deeper into this. I know how to look and how to draw, but I still am having problems with the how to hold part. I think this is crucial. How do you hold what you’ve just seen into memory, and how do you translate that into drawing?

That is all.

It sometimes is very educational doing something the wrong way on purpose. You see why it is better to follow certain path, and avoid less successful paths.

In this drawing I started with the details around the waist of the robot and wanted to know how far I could go before I got stuck. It appeared to be only 20 minutes.

Was it a waste of time? No, certainly not. I saw some details I had never seen before, because I was so fixed on details. However, the total overview and connection between the parts was lost, so the drawing was a failure as an end result.

There is a right way to draw something. This wasn’t that way.

That is all.

สวัสดีตอนบ่ายค่ะเพื่อนๆ หวังว่าคงไม่เลทเกินไปสำหรับการอัพเดทสิ่งประดิษฐ์ช่วงบ่ายอย่างนี้นะคะ

มีใครอยากแอบสอดส่องห้องพี่น้องของเราบ้างไหมคะ โยนลูก Spyball ตัวนี้แล้วปฏิบัติการได้เล้ย..

SPYBALL สมชื่อเลยค่ะ ไม่ใช่ของเล่นธรรมดาจริงๆเลยเพราะเป็นลูกบอลนักสืบที่ทำให้เราไปรู้เห็นความเป็นไป

ของห้องคนอื่นในบ้านได้สนุกสนาน ใช้งานก็ง่ายบังคับผ่านทาง Wi-Fi จากคอมพิวเตอร์เราหรือ โทรศัพท์มือถือก็ได้ค่ะ

เจ้าตัวนี้เป็นของเล่นไฮเทคชิ้นใหม่ของ Wowwee ที่ถอยไปโชว์ตัวหมาดๆในงาน CES 2009 เมื่อไหร่ซีจะได้ไปบ้างเนี่ย ฮึ่ม
ว่ากันว่าการเคลื่อนที่เงียบๆและหมุนได้ 360 องศาทำให้เจ้านี้ร้ายกาจทีเดียว แถมซีได้ข่าวว่าควบคุมผ่าน PSP ได้ด้วยล่ะค่ะ
จริงๆแล้วเรียกว่า Spyball เป็นของเล่นดูน่ารักไปเลย ลองเรียกว่ามันเป็น CCTV รุ่นใหม่สิคะ ฟังดูอยากเตะออกจากห้องเลยล่ะ

สนนราคาที่ไปโชว์อยู่ที่ $170 ค่ะ สนมั้ย

It seems that three times really is a charm, because the third attempt of drawing WowWee’s toy robot Tri-bot is the best attempt, even though it was just a sketch of 25 minutes.

Still, I caught myself at peeking too much at my drawing and too little at the subject. This bad habit is still withholding me from progressing. In the book “Keys to Drawing” by Bert Dodson, I’m still only at project 1 out of 48.

Perhaps it’s frustrating, but my guess is that if I keep challenging myself, eventually, I will be able to draw what I see or imagine with my mind’s eye.

Still a long way to go, but small jolts of improvement keep me motivated to continue.

If I think back all those years ago when I was drawing and painting under the guidance of an art teacher, I see something has changed since that time. In those days I couldn’t get myself motivated enough to draw and redraw the same subject over and over again. It was just too frustrating to me that I couldn’t get lines on paper the way I wanted.

Now I have learned this steep learning curve is normal. It is perhaps even necessary, that you first suck at drawing. It is a hurdle you must overcome. The harder it is, the more you keep doing it, because once you stop, all that effort you put into it goes to waste.

Furthermore, a teacher can only guide you. You have to do most of the work yourself. The work is that of directly translating what you see on paper, without thinking much about it, other than what might help you to find new ways to put it on paper. It is the self-discipline of keeping those judgmental thoughts and feelings at bay long enough for you to finish your drawing. When you’re done, you can laugh and mock all you want, because by then the artistic work is already recorded on paper or as bits and bytes in an image file.

Oh boy, that sketch is so “b-ugly”.

That is all.

Second sketch of the Tri-bot. I tried to sketch the big surfaces first, and connect them while looking at the bot.

Now I only need to do this a lot more. After a few weeks I should be ready to draw me some humans as well. Luckily, the ‘bot doesn’t mind to be sketched, but humans (including myself) may want my drawings to resemble their image.

That is all.

Okay, I’m slowly getting into the grove of drawing. The proportions on the bot aren’t fully correct, but the drawing process was good (looking mostly at the toy in the initial stages).

The drawing was done with pencil on paper, in about 30 minutes. That is longest I’ve spent on a single drawing on real paper so far. I had to rub out some parts of the drawing, because I got them completely wrong at the start.

I guess if I start with roughly sketching first, and then building my drawing, I could without the eraser. So that’s my next plan, sketch first, check the rough sketch, then commit to it and finalize the drawing. While doing that, I should look mostly at the subject, and not so much at my own drawing.

Discipline is hard, especially if you have to keep it yourself.

That is all.

Desenvolvido pela WowWee, o Joebot é um robozinho muito interativo, caracteristica que despertou muita curiosidade e interesse na CES 2009.

A proposta é que o pequeno robô seja uma espécie de amigo eletrônico, para isso ele conta com várias funções como caminhar, falar, patrulhar, entre outras.

É também bastante inteligente, se o humano batucar alguma coisa, o Joebot é capaz de repetir.

Vídeo 1:

I really feel like I need to gush about these really cool flying butterflies. Finding toys that fly without a huge scary propeller can be challenging. There’s also the whole class of flying toys that require a lot of space and finesse. Having neither a lot of space or finesse (when it comes to flying things)…I really liked these easy to use FlyTech insects (there are moths and mosquitoes in the line) when they came in last spring. So I took them to the Today Show. They were intended as the last “wow wee” toy of the segment. At set up the night before the entire crew also really liked them. We all took turns flying them around the studio. The segment was outside the next day–so everything got a little damp when it started to rain. I’m not sure exactly which factor played a bigger role but when I went to show Al Roker how cool they were–none of them would fly, not a one. It was really disappointing since such a poor performance made the toy look bad. (Not to mention that I also looked a bit silly protesting that they really do fly!) You can fly these butterflies inside–the wings aren’t hard–so it’s not like flying a plane in the house. For a full review check out our award listing. They are from WowWee and retail for just under $25–making them a good value for the holidays.

WowWee Alive Lion Cub Plush Robotic Toy in Tan

From WowWee

Introducing the first friends in a new series of lifelike cubs from WowWee Alive. With super-soft fur and a totally realistic look, this cuddly cub gives little lion lovers a true-to-life experience. Pick him up by the scruff of the neck and watch his legs go limp, just like a real cub being carried by his mother. Requires 4 “AA” batteries, included. Measures 16″ long.

Review More