Doc started out as a simple head on a table, but quickly evolved into a full show, replete with various multimedia and novel interfaces, taking up a full room. Shows include "Doc Beardsley Presents The Invisible Machine", "From the Earth to the Foon", and the "Big Time" game show. Over the course of two years, the character evolved to have a full body, along with a detailed human-like skin. Research was also done into a free conversation mode, based upon synthetic interview technology developed at CMU along with perception based on face and audio tracking.
Doc was featured in the press a number of times, culminating with an article in the August 2002 issue of DISCOVER Magazine: Future Tech, Faking Intelligence.
More on the character can be found at the IAI Website - some media has been replicated here.
Once the initial founders of the project graduated, however, the project fell by the wayside and Doc went into storage at the Robotics Institute until the Fall semester, 2003. He was brought to the new ETC facilities and resurrected for an additional semester of demos to visitors. A team of first year students including Sabrina Haskell, Peter Stepniewicz, Josh Taylor, and Salim Zayat formed with an interest in continuing the work of the IAI, and pitched the idea to the ETC faculty. The project was approved and officially started in the Spring of 2004.
The team on the Interbots Initiative during the Spring of 2004 included Sabrina Haskell, Eugenia Leu, Peter Stepniewicz, Salim Zayat, & Jichen Zhu. Additionally, Andy Hosmer joined the team as a consultant to build the robot figure. During the Spring they managed to complete an incredible amount of work, including building the Quasi robot from scratch, his kiosk, all control hardware, all software, and a base set of behaviors. Due to the time constraints of attempting to build so much in one semester, however, the content was fairly basic.
During the Fall 2004 Semester, teams of students worked on Quasi in the Building Virtual Worlds class. The results included some of the projects seen on the interactive activities and featurettes pages. This paved the way for the Spring 2005 semester, in which the new team of 10 students listed on the people page have many new goals.