It seems interesting but I wonder if people would welcome this. Having an iPad with my boss' face on it rolling behind me at work feels creepy.
(Competition coming soon https://www.suitabletech.com/ )
The timezones work out great for people in the US, and the museums have nothing to lose since it's all incremental revenue.
One could argue that this would be great for disabled people. Maybe so, but that wasn't what was shown. However, when they hook up a 360 degree high-def camera and feed it through to a next-gen Oculus Rift VR headset, yeah, then we'll talk.
Not going to happen. Public museums of Europe want you to go there. European cities like London, Paris, Madrid and Prague have cultural tourism as one of their main incomes. They don't want to have the experience comoditized.
Also security has enough problems with telephones that robbers use to track the guards if they have them in their line of vision. Add one of those "guard trackers" inside the museum, so they could study their movements and know exactly what they are doing, how much they are, and where they are, their age, their corpulence, the arms they carry, their phisio-phisical state(guards some times are somnolent).
It's not a very elegant design, though, and it makes carrying the thing a hassle.
I don't think it will replace sales calls just yet, but it's a step forward.
Edit: AnyBots is U$ 15.000, so this is an order of magnitude cheaper.
And I found on Google TILR at U$ 10.000 http://robodynamics.com/products/
Plus, I found a hack of an iRobot that claims to give you a similar device for U$ 500 :)
http://www.fastcompany.com/1726174/500-irobot-hack-lets-you-...
Usually when I feel this way it's a great idea, because I have terrible instincts, so keep up the good work, guys! I'd love to try this out with various technology teams I help that do distributed work.
It will be interesting to see if this tech really goes mainstream over the coming decades -- I predict it will.
Just an observation: a telepresence robot at a restaurant would not do much good in that the it cannot eat for you. But robotic servers -- that's entirely feasible.
There is a sense of irony in that Trevor Blackwell along with the other YC partners are backing a company that essentially wants to put AnyBots out of business.
Interesting none-the-less though.
