Availabot: “

Reporting on the Royal College of Art Show 2006. Read more on Pixelsumo.

Availabot by Jack Schulze (Interaction Design) plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. It’s a presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy… and because the puppets are made in small numbers on a rapid-prototyping machine, it can look just like you.

‘Because Availabot works entirely over USB, you can plug in as many puppets as you have USB ports (or friends on your IM buddylist). There are no extra leads for power, and no hidden boxes. Currently, Availabot works with iChat on Mac OS X 10.4—but we’re looking to extend it to other similar apps on the Mac (like Skype) and, in the future, to Windows.’

The customisation of each bot is what will make this a commercial success, so let’s hope they can figure out a way of making this cheap enough. Jack also talked about daisy-chains so you can have more bots than USB ports. Good luck with the venture.

Photos on Flickr.

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(Via Pixelsumo.)

[tags]visualisation, tangible, interface, instant messaging[/tags]

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