Hasta La Gadget!

The yellow blob-like My Keepon is a small stationary robot that reacts to touch and music. It’s been tickling audiences over the web for years, but in a month from now, you’ll be able to take home one of your own.

We got a chance to check out a final production prototype of My Keepon in real life. It’s no Wall-E or Jonny 5, but if you’re looking for a dancing companion who won’t steal the spotlight, it’s an entertaining addition to your desk or bookshelf.

My Keepon has two modes: music and touch. In music mode, it listens for a rhythm using sophisticated beat detection software. It can either detect strong beats, like hand clapping or drum hits, or listen in a different way to react to more complicated music. The “dancing” is a mix of squirming up and down, leaning side to side and rotating around his base, and the style varies depending on the music being played. You can choose which mode you want it in with one of two buttons toward the bottom of its black base.

The robot has a sensor on its head, a mic in its nose and sensors all around its belly. You can scratch its nose, bop its head, or poke it in the side or the stomach, and it’ll react with a combination of sound and movement.

“He doesn’t like being poked in his butt,” said Marek Michalowski, co-creator of the robot. When My Keepon is poked in the rear, it issues an indignant exclamation and sometimes turns around to “see” who did it.

The robot was responsive to the various stimuli Michalowski and I put it through. It sometimes had trouble finding the beat of more mellow tunes, but a quick song change fixed that (and who wants to rock out to Celine Dion anyway?). The prototype we used was responsive to pokes, prods and hugs when you squeeze both sides of its spherical body, and the little sighs and squeaks, beeps and boops, are completely giggle-inducing. If I had one of these at my desk, rest assured my productivity level would go way down (and my coworkers might hate me). Unfortunately, like many toys there is a degree of novelty to My Keepon that could get worn after a handful of uses and leave it dusty and forlorn on a bookshelf.

Though the robot is cute (and fun!), it’s also dancing for a good cause. Michalowski helped develop the $30,000 original Keepon used to study social interaction with autistic children. A portion of proceeds from the My Keepon toy go back toward putting more research Keepons in the hands of clinics working with autism.

As the consumer version of the robot won’t run you $30,000, it’s obviously a bit of a downgrade. For instance, the research version of the robot is made of silicon rubber; the consumer My Keepon is made of a similar, cheaper material able to be mass-produced. The consumer version also lacks a camera, which the research version includes for tele-operational purposes.

The My Keepon robot will be available for purchase in late October for less than $50.