Orbotix Sphero – Ironically One-Sided
Orbotix Sphero – Do Spheres Have No Sides Or Infinite Sides? Either Way, It’s Ironic.
The Orbotix Sphero is a ball which has its own gyroscope and can be controlled from your phone via bluetooth. While this sounds like a cool concept, you’ll find that the Orbotix Sphero is ironically one-sided. (Get it? Spheres? One side? Whatever.) There are only three functions to the Orbotix Sphero, one of which is still a concept. It gives you the ability to change its color (which only works well in the dark), roll it around from a control on your phone, and play virtual games. (Still not officially announced with the Orbotix Sphero.)
Abilities Of The Sphero
This gadget has a software, like an app, that you download onto your cellphone. From your phone, or tablet, you control the Orbotix Sphero. The controls are difficult to master and take some time and practice. In addition to being able to roll around, the Orbotix Sphero has an LED inside it that can change the color of your Sphero! As long as it’s completely dark! The pictures above compare the Sphero light in day and night – you will surely see that this feature is almost pointless anywhere where it’s not dark.
A Math Game? Are You Kidding?
Though the AR/Virtual Reality Game is still unofficial, we know that it is called QuizTug and involves math problems, which immediately turns me off. ”Hey, dude. Wanna play with my sphere? It lets us do math problems on our phones.” EPIC FAIL.
UPDATE: A Sphero Rep has posted a comment (check it out) about some possible upcoming changes and enhancements that may take place as the Spero moves from prototype to launch. Sounds promising. Thanks for the info, Paul!
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Thanks for your post here are some thoughts from our perspective.
The ball you looked at is a prototype – the shell is a prototype as well which is just painted so the translucency isn’t anything close to accurate. Also the LED isn’t being driven that hard because we are still optimizing the battery life. Right now we get close to an hour of continuous play and at launch the lighting will be much better.
The ball sends telemetry back to the phone – speed, direction of travel, compass heading, rate of heading change, orientation and collision detection. All of these elements can be incorporated into the apps.
The “math app” was not a game we plan to launch – it was a demo app to show how you can create a game where two people control one ball in turns. That demo technology is now being incorporated into a tennis type game. We agree – Math = Fail – not fun at all.
Controllability is always top of our list to improve. The version your tried was a prototype and several control systems were not fully integrated including the compass, driver orientation, and optical encoders. Bottom line is it will be much more controllable in the future and feedback from folks playing with different versions of our prototypes is helping us develop a better system and UI. But out goal is to let developers create their own mechanism and UI to drive – one that is appropriate for their app. The basic driving app is hopefully just one of many fun driving experiences. We also will allow for over the air firmware updates so as we improve the driving algorithm we can update units in the wild.
And we agree – as Sphero is today – it just drives as we haven’t shown many game apps. We understand that the success of Sphero is not in the engineering but in the game play and entertainment value. We have been doing a ton of experimentations with single and multi player games, voice control, using the Sphero as a controller, color mods, personality creators, collision detection and the list goes on. Some of our ideas are good – some aren’t – we are figuring it out.
So hope you give Sphero a second look as it moves from prototype to launch.
Appreciate the feedback – Paul
Mr. Berberian,
I look forward to those changes and, if they are made, I think that this product has potential.
J-Man
Mr. Berberian
I look forward to the product, woderful .
!
Iron Yao
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