The new and improved Ballie, which Samsung previewed during its press conference at CES 2024 in Las Vegas today, is around the size of a bowling ball, packing a battery that’s designed to last two to three hours. Ballie sports a spatial lidar sensor to help it navigate rooms and obstacles, as well as a 1080p projector with two lenses that allows the robot to project movies and video calls and even act as a second PC monitor.
“Use [Ballie] to project images and stream content on walls, and it can automatically adjust the picture based on the wall distance and lighting conditions,” Samsung writes in press release. “It [can] automatically detect people’s posture and facial angle and adjust the optimal projection angle for you.”
Does it whistle at you? Then it would be as much fun as R2D2 from Star Wars. If not, if you could get Ballie off the ground, it might be as much fun as the proxy robot from Hotel Cosmos, by Raymond Z. Gallun, published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938.
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