The entry of robots into mainstream American life probably will be pinpointed, when historic accounts are written, to right about now.
As sales of an animatronic Elvis Presley named "Alive Elvis" peaked around Christmas at the Sharper Image, the unveiling of Rovio - an ambulatory contraption that's your eyes, ears and voice when you're away from home - was only weeks away. Last week, the Kennedy Center in Washington opened a festival called "Japan! Culture and Hyper-Culture" that peers deep into the robotic future - a landscape where robots clean up toxic waste, are cuddly companions to senior-citizen shut-ins, and stand in for live people in ways that allow you to be in two places at once.
"Alive Elvis" will be long gone by then. "When you get too real, you scare people," said Art Janis, vice president of sales for WowWee Corp., which spent two years developing the life-sized Elvis bust, loaded with 10 facial motors that allow him to shift his gaze and curl his lip while singing "Blue Suede Shoes."
In this Wild West world of robotics, advanced technology, much of it from Japan, keeps the rules fluid. In the United States, robotics range from a popular-priced lifelike parrot that runs on AA batteries to an exact replica of the famous robot from the 1960s TV show Lost in Space, sold at Hammacher Schlemmer for $24,500.
In between the two lies the Frankenstein factor. Particularly in Japan, researchers are driven to create artificial life that in the West inspires fascination and ambivalence, even when it's Kokoro Co.'s DER2, a life-size Japanese maiden who holds court tirelessly in the Kennedy Center lobby. She fields questions with pre-programmed answers that, among other things, anticipate those who tell her she's creepy: "Robots have feelings, too!"
So when is she getting married? She sweetly replies, "I'm looking for the right guy with a heart of gold and brain circuits to match."
Spoken like a true actroid - the term that has succeeded android, and readily applies to creatures like Asimo, the current superstar among robots, developed by Honda to shake his shiny bootie and run as fast as 3.7 m.p.h. The more generically named Toyota Partner Robot, which resembles Star Wars' C-3P0, plays trumpet ("Moon River," among other numbers), thanks to pliable artificial lips and agile fingers. It is, however, outdated: In December, Toyota unveiled a robot whose fingers sprout small, precise squares that can navigate a violin fingerboard, wiggling just enough to create vibrato.
Beyond that, robot guru Hiroshi Ishiguro, of Osaka University's Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, created a lifelike, life-sized version of himself - he calls it a geminoid, as in Gemini, the twins - that moves by means of pneumatic pistons and can carry on long-distance conversations with Ishiguro via the Internet. Ishiguro wants to send the geminoid on the lecture circuit without him. "No jet lag," he says, but so far, nobody will pay a machine Ishiguro's fee.
The biggest revelation, though, came one day when his geminoid was being aggressively poked: Ishiguro swears he "felt" it on the other end. So robots really do have feelings? The Japanese like that illusion - so much so that Kokoro's DER2 maintenance team won't let even Kennedy Center employees see the kimono-clad actroid when it's turned off.
The key cultural difference between robotic East and West is that the Japanese are raised on robot-friendly comic books, while Americans live with a darker iconography - not just Frankenstein's monster but also Hal, the 2001: A Space Odyssey computer that began benignly but turned megalomaniacal.
So American robots are gravitating toward being either subservient extensions of their owners or not human at all. The new pride and joy of the Elvis creators, WowWee Corp., is the $299 Rovio, which will hit the market in September after $1 million worth of research and development. It has similar functions to Ishiguro's geminoid but is obviously mechanical, moving around on rollers, monitoring pets and children at home through Web-cam eyes.
"You can be in Hong Kong, click on 'Jenny's Room,' and it'll go there," says Janis. "You can read her a bedtime story - in your voice," and in real time.
Outside of service robots, the major successes in both Japan and the United States are robotic animals, again with key differences.
The Japanese charmer is Paro, an affectionate robotic harp seal that nuzzles and bays like the real thing but doesn't bite or need feeding (though recharging happens with a mouth cord resembling a feeding tube). Takanori Shibata, senior research scientist from Ubiquitous Functions Research Group, which helped develop Paro, says the harp seal was chosen so as not to suffer comparisons with common domestic animals.
Owner testimonials say Paro can be blessedly portable - one video shows him in a sushi bar - and therapeutic: Another video shows an agitated dementia patient being calmed immediately when handed Paro. Early versions of Paro could crawl; newer ones don't, since part of the illusion is its devotion - guaranteed by its inability to wander away.
Illusion, in the robot world, comes with a price that can be measured partly in dollars (Paro will cost $4,000 when introduced to the U.S. market this fall) and partly in sensors: Paro has approximately 100; Ishiguro's geminoid has 200. WowWee's animals, such as its $59 "Alive Lion Cub" (due in August), have five, but in key places: The belly sensor, for one, makes the cub "fall asleep" when rubbed. So it's real, but only real enough.
Such are the lessons learned from Elvis, whose price plummeted from $349 to $89 in recent weeks. How could someone as familiar and beloved as Elvis be intimidating? The answer may be that robots inevitably have behavioral non sequiturs. The Elvis lip, for one, curls without motivation - subtle, but not unlike being in the company of an untreated mental patient. And you might not want that in your home - any more than animatronic versions of Marilyn Monroe or Michael Jackson - ideas that didn't survive the discussion stage at WowWee.
WowWee reports that Elvis has been most happily placed in public areas, like theme restaurants and karaoke bars, and that sales have been curiously regional. Though the Philadelphia Sharper Image has had considerable success with WowWee's robotic monkey - all the rage last Halloween - Elvis wasn't stocked for lack of interest; the King of Prussia store, on the other hand, had 13.
"Everything has a beginning," said Janis. "The monkey led to Elvis, just as Elvis led to the cubs. The future is always going to be two things: Make a version that's simplified and even more affordable and make something more spectacular that's wanted by somebody who has everything."
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