“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“
It’s hard to keep up with all the new robot toys hitting the market these days, but occasionally something comes out that really grabs your attention. Something like Reach Robotics’ Mekamon ($300). When I first saw this crazy, four-legged spider-thing, I got excited. It looks like something out of a video game or an anime or a Transformer movie that isn’t awful. It looks, in other words, awesome. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, either. Apple featured it in its stores recently, and it’s hard to deny this distinctly otherworldly bot isn’t impressive to behold.
When it arrived, I tore the sucker out of the box, slapped the big battery in, and then proceeded to suffer through the usual delays that prevent instant gratification with toys these days. First, there’s the app that needs to be downloaded. In my case, it didn’t work quite right on my Samsung tablet, so I had to re-download it on my phone.
Controlling Mekamon is like taking charge of a newborn mechanical alien.
After a successful install, it was on to… a firmware update. Every robot ever needs firmware updates, despite the fact that it’s something you never see them do in movies. Oh, and the battery, which regrettably uses a proprietary cable (as opposed to, say, a standard USB cord), also needed a charge. All in all, getting this thing up and running was a bit frustrating, and anti-climactic.
But then, with the battery charged and re-slapped back into the Mekamon’s butt, those four legs started dancing to life — I was immediately entranced. Mekamon has a lot going on, even by today’s toy robot standards. It has “augmented reality” games and can battle other Mekamon(s?), should you happen to know another nerd who likes shelling out several hundred dollars for weird toys. The app also has an absurd level of minutiae for customizing every aspect of the stance, gait, height, and steps of the robot. In other words, options I’ll probably never really quite understand the importance of.
None of that mattered in the face of watching this ridiculous contraption move. A lot of companies tout the idea of toys with personality (Sphero’s pretty good at it with its Star Wars droids), but Mekamon just overflows with a weirdly and sincerely delightful sense of earnest. The robot has an array of canned reactions — everything from shooting pretend guns and lunging forward, to acting excited or scared, or lifting its leg to pretend urinate (a huge hit with the kids). Most of these movements are somehow adorable. Even its death sequence is hilarious to watch.
Controlling Mekamon directly, via touch controls on a phone, is a lot like suddenly taking charge of a newborn mechanical alien. It lumbers along in an arachnid way, scaring cats, mesmerizing children (and their fathers), and occasionally overturning after getting caught up on the messes of blankets and toys that are part of its new landscape.
The mix of a real world toy and virtual opponents is an interesting gimmick, but seldom seems like anything more.
You can adjust Mekamon’s legs and body height on the fly, to help the bot maneuver better — but most kids aren’t likely to mess with that stuff. Being an adult, I did mess with the tuning, and it opened a world of maneuverability. It can even climb steps, though honestly, my attempts have been less than successful. However skilled a pilot you may be, it’s sheer fun to make it go up, down, and all around.
The Mekamon, when idle, tends to twitch as if nervous, which adds to its personality, and the illusion that it’s more than a simple toy. My ten-year-old has decided Mekamon would make an ideal monster for a movie, and she’s absolutely right. If this thing were 50 feet tall, it would be horrifying. The body fits heavily in my hand, and it’s just big enough to be impressive, without taking up too much space.
There’s not any kind of automatic mode for the Mekamon to venture out and explore on its own, and it also lacks any kind of onboard camera, which is unfortunate (especially for the price). I also can’t say I’m a fan of the clumsy phone-based AR, where you watch the screen (with the camera pointed at the robot) and pretend to pilot the robot around virtual obstacles. Mekamon has a lot of that. It’s gamified AR, though, so you can (virtually) upgrade your robot, much like Anki does with the cars in its Overdrive set.
Mekamon comes with a take on the classic Asteroids theme, where you move Mekamon around to aim and shoot at falling space rocks that bombard your screen. Another mode has you defend a virtual base against waves of robotic invaders. The mix of a real world toy and virtual opponents is an interesting gimmick, but seldom seems like anything more. The video game portion of these activities is very oldschool and primitive, and I never got into the habit of watching a real object moving through the filter of my phone screen.
There’s supposed to be a game built around Mekamon, but the robot’s $300 price, and awkward AR app, stopped me from enjoying it. What I did love was watching Mekamon move, seeing where I can make it go, and enjoying the absurd sci-fi spectacle of the thing. Mekamon excels as a remote-controlled robot, pairing customization with ease-of-use. If you feel the need to have a mechanical creature you can completely control, this is the coolest toy of the year.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.