Video conferencing stinks. Skype calls, Google+ Hangouts, Apple's FaceTime and start-ups like AirTime annoy us with frozen frames, lousy images, muddled sound and, in the case of FaceTime, AT&T hater-aid.
Suitable Technologies says there's a better way: robots.
Company CEO Scott Hassan prefers that people not call the $16,000 Beam Remote Presence Device a robot. He prefers the term Beam, or RPD.
Um, OK.
The robo ... er, Beam stands 5 feet, 2 inches tall, rolls on two wheels and sports a camera-equipped 17-inch monitor. It is controlled remotely using an app that runs on just about any laptop. The monitor shows you who's controlling it, while the camera sends the pilot a video feed of whatever Beam is looking at. Another camera keeps tabs on where Beam is going so the guy at the controls (hopefully) doesn't whack into office chairs, desks, trashcans or co-workers. Six microphones pick up audio while canceling out background noise and potential echoing.
“We designed it to be sort of toned down, not too in your face and really trying to accent the screen,” Hassan told Wired. “It's not a lightweight system; it’s about 100 pounds. But it’s designed not to fall over on someone and it can move things like an office chair out of its way pretty easily if it needs to.”
Batteries mounted in the base of the 'bot deliver up to 8 hours of non-stop operation and video chatting. Four Wi-Fi radios ensure Beam can deliver low-latency video at 30 frames per second as closely to real time as possible. The idea is to make you feel like you're right there.
"We really want this device to be as if you were there in the office, we want to allow you to 'beam there,'" Hassan said, explaining the name of the RPD. “We think the biggest selling point is being able to travel there instantly, to allow you to have something that feels like a face-to-face meeting.”
At a resolution of 480p, the feeling isn't quite face-to-face. Hassan said delivering high-definition video and real-time imagery, particularly while moving around an office, would strain a user’s Wi-Fi bandwidth, so Suitable chose latency over image quality.
“A lot of people fly all the way across the country to have a single handshake,” he said. “People want that face-to-face interaction, they want to know that they have the other person’s attention, eye to eye, face to face. If the video was a second or two behind, we wouldn’t be able to capture that face-to-face feeling.”
All you need to do to control Beam is download Suitable’s video-chatting software, which works with any Mac or PC. The company isn’t tapping into Skype, Google+ Hangouts or other video-calling software because they focus on stationary image quality rather than delivering in-motion latency. They also hinder the ability to overlay other information (such as an office map) over a video feed, Hassan said.
The company started taking pre-orders Wednesday. Suitable hopes to deliver its first units in November. At this point, you've gotta be in the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley to get one, but the company — spun out of Palo Alto robot builder Willow Garage — hopes to expand that early next year.
The big question is whether anyone will pay $16,000 for one, especially when there are far cheaper alternatives. Double Robotics, a Y Combinator start-up, sells the Double, which is basically an iPad dock mounted on a stand with wheels. You can get it for $2,000 and control it with an iPad app. On the other hand, although it is (relatively) cheaper, the Double is far less sophisticated than the Beam because it uses the camera, microphone and speakers packaged in in the iPad.
Still, the fact Double Robotics has sold more than 600 of the gadgets and brought in about $1.2 million in pre-sales suggests there is a market for high-tech telecommuting robots.
The Beam has grown more sophisticated since Texai, the 2010 prototype we saw on the TV show The Big Bang Theory, and subsequent versions. “Our alpha product was basically Skype on a stick,” Hassan said. “This is more than Skype on a stick."
But he still insists, "it’s not a full-on robot. I know how to build robots, but a robot is much more than this. It has to have arms, it has to pick things up, it has to act on its own.”
The Beam doesn’t do any of that, he notes. Fair enough. But c'mon ... it's a robot.
