At Interbots, we feel that an embodied character is critical to a believable animatronic experience-- no matter how impressive the technology, it is impossible to suspend an audience's disbelief and create the illusion of life without an engaging character and personality. We also believe that the most successful entertainment experiences involve the contributions of writers, animators, sculptors, painters, and other artists. Therefore, the development of simple, intuitive content creation tools that allow non-technologists to author content for entertainment robotics is essential.
Following these principles, we have two primary goals:
- Harness the success of household entertainment robotics (such as Sony's AIBO and Wow Wee's Robosapien) and the interest of the hobbyist community to introduce interactivity to the field of higher-end custom animatronics. More specifically, we wish to develop a fully interactive, autonomous animatronic character that is believable and entertaining.
- Give non-technologists the ability to author content for entertaining animatronic experiences by developing an extensible platform that allows artists to rapidly design and create complete and interactive social experiences with animatronic characters.
In accordance with these goals, we have already created a believable animatronic character named Quasi, and an extensible platform that allows for the development of interactive social experiences with Quasi. Interactivity designers need not rely on pre-manufactured content; the Interbots Platform allows new, experiences to be developed quickly and easily. No programming or technical knowledge is required-- developers can create new behaviors for the animatronic character using simple custom graphical authoring tools. These tools allow for Quasi's interactive experiences to range from fully autonomous to completely pre-scripted. The usability of the authoring tools was verified when teams of four students with no previous knowledge of the Interbots Platform were able to develop a theatrical karaoke show, an interactive photo kiosk, a live puppeteering interface, and interactive dream sequences in two week development periods.
To meet these goals, we combine a multitude of technologies, including speech recognition, face tracking, proximity detection, synthetic interview, finite state machines, show control, and animatronics. These characters are developed and brought to life through custom-built animatronic figures created with off-the-shelf hobby servos.