Photo by Artur Tumasjan on Unsplash

This episode starts off with a focus on the long history of the iRobot company, and what’s made them successful over these many years, and how the vacuum and mopping robots have found a place in so many homes.  Michael and Michael speculate on the notion of moving to a service – where the bots might be delivered to the home by autonomous vehicles – harkening back to the discussion in the previous episode, with the Ford delivery car having a robot for the last 10m for package delivery – and clean your house through a bot-door, a secure futuristic doggie door.  Michael R remembers a couple of examples of robots that fold laundry and Michael M chimes in with the Kon-Mari method of folding shirts.

The pair discuss the latest version of the HP VR backpack computer, which provides the compute power for a tether less VR experience, bringing back the usual idea of how AR > VR.  

In the department of brain science, Michael and Michael check out an article on music building the brains of premature babies.  Another example that highlights the relationship between music, mathematics and learning is Michael M’s mother-in-law Janet Fox’s book A Well Tempered Mind, which she co-authored with Peter Perret.

Star Wars is part of our everyday world, and it is difficult to go 24 hours without the galaxy, far, far away being part of our daily consciousness.  This episode is no different, and the in addition to the droid references, the pair discusses the recent opening of the Galaxy’s Edge, which features a chance for Disney park visitors to pilot the Millennium Falcon.  The real ride, however, is the entire land, replete with easter eggs to discover from the multiple movies, in-character Disney cast members to interact with, and even food & beverage from the movies.  Even while waiting in line, park visitors may interact with the Star Wars environment via an alternate reality game through the Disney app, inviting the player to become part of the Resistance themselves and go on side quests.  Reminiscent of the highly successful alternate reality game launched in BMW films The Hire series, the opportunity to be part of the Star Wars universe on a very personal level is certainly appealing to those that have had a very steady media diet of all things Star Wars over the past 4 decades.

We conclude this episode with the exciting news that Michael R will be in California next week, as an attendee at WWDC19, and you can get his play by play on the event over on https://michaelrowe01.com 

Selected Links

TechCrunch article: iRobot’s newest mop and vacuum talk to each other to better clean up — https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/28/irobots-newest-mop-and-vacuum-talk-to-each-other-to-better-clean-up/ 

ZDNet article: How iRobot used data science, cloud and DevOps to design its next-gn smart home robots — https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-irobot-used-data-science-cloud-and-devops-to-design-its-next-gen-smart-home-robots/ 

Gizmodo article: RIP Your Dreams of Never Folding Laundry Again,