Robotic toys have yet to really catch on; the excitement of an iPod playing robot, a surveillance robot, or a dancing robot tends to wear off pretty quickly. A new company called Robonica thinks there's a better way:Â introducing robotic toys as the means to playing a structured game.
Long the purview of companies like Wowwee, many robotic toys suffer from the "Christmas morning problem": they're exciting for a few minutes, but then the novelty wears off. Even new companies like Bossa Nova Robotics are set up for the same problem with their robots Prime-8 and Penbo (Prime-8 is a gorilla that farts; Penbo is a penguin that pops out a baby robopenguin. Nothing gendered about that ATÂ ALL). While they're very fancy for toys, they aren't good at holding kids' attention spans.
Which is why I was intrigued when I heard that Robonica, a company based in South Africa with a commercial office in Massachusetts, was taking a different approach: releasing a set of robotic toys designed to allow the owner to compete in a structured game or competition.
Robonica was born out of frustration – frustration with the inability of the current generation of radio-controlled and robotic toys to provide any form of structured and interactive play, and frustration with the increasingly anti-social and intangible realities of video games.
On 28Â September they'll be releasing Roboni-i, a 2-wheeled programmable robot that can not only wander around autonomously responding to stimuli -- roughly the capability of many Wowwee-type toys -- but can also become a playable virtual avatar in a structured MMOÂ (massively multiplayer online) environment. The gaming structure can also be exported to local, in-person competitions and tournaments using the physical robots.
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What's fascinating to me about this is that it's taking the best business models of video and tabletop games and combining them with these robotic toys that have a lot of potential but are lacking a true niche. Compare this to something like Dungeons and Dragons or Magic: The Gathering, or video games like World of Warcraft and Halo. The structured social and competitive network encourages gamers to buy the required "hardware" -- whether it's collectable cards or robots -- and makes it worth having. And no one can question the success of these MMO models.
Wowwee's Robosapien and Bossa Nova's Prime-8 do have "suggested" games and built-in communication capabilities with other robots in the line; in fact, Prime-8 is fundamentally not all that mechanically different from Roboni-i. But what they're lacking is an overarching game structure. There's a difference between saying your robot is capable of playing laser tag with other robots, versus marketing a robot as an avatar in a highly integrated virtual and real world infrastructure to play that laser tag.
Now, Robonica is really a pioneer in this realm, so it's easy to question whether or not people are actually willing to drop money on these little robots just to play a game made up by the vendor. Then again, in elementary school I was dropping embarassing amounts of money on small circular pieces of cardboard just to play a loosely structured game, so I can see a programmable robot being a far more attractive investment. Most other robotic toys are running between $50 and $100; Robonica hasn't released its pricing yet, but I'll be curious to see where they end. With the programmability and accessories for the gaming, I could easily see it falling closer to the $250 of a LEGOÂ Mindstorm kit.
