Sphero is built by a company called Orbotix, and its co-founder, Ian Bernstein, says that Sphero is the next generation in gaming systems. You’ve got your old-school Atari, NES, and even PlayStation, with their wired controllers. Then you’ve got the Nintendo Wii with its magic wand and the Xbox and its Kinect, which took gaming and the controllers into the third dimension. Sphero is the next step — gamers will no longer have to just stare at the screen. Physical reality — your surroundings — will come into play.
Which is lovely, but if you’ve never seen Sphero, describing it in such highfalutin terms isn’t helping, so here’s the lowdown: It’s a ball. A white ball. It’s got a little blue sort of face-like logo on it. It glows in different colors. And yes, at a demo in April 2012, President Obama had a go with Sphero, saying, “Excuse me, give me some space to drive my ball.”
All right, let’s bust this little guy open and see what Sphero’s got going on in there.
Sphero’s Guts and Glory
Inside the glowing white ball, you’ll find a tiny Segway scooter, just like the one in “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” with a miniature mustachioed Kevin James proudly serving his Sphero.
All right, there’s no miniature mall cop, but there is a sort of miniature Segway inside. There’s a gyroscope and an accelerometer that talk to your tablet (or phone or what have you) and two little rubber wheels. The sensors give yaw, pitch and roll information to whatever app you’re playing with so that the computer knows what Sphero is up to — that little sneak. A counterweight (you can think of it as a tiny Kevin James, if it helps) gets the mechanism moving when you tell it to.
The little wheels run around the inside of the ball like a hamster in a wheel. That is, if that hamster had a spring-loaded bearing pressing down on its furry little back to make sure his tiny hamster feet never leave the inside surface of the ball, even when cornering at speed. Maybe you could put the hamster in the Paul Blart uniform — because that would be adorable.
We all know, however, that it’s what’s on the outside that counts. “We sort of designed it to be tough,” Bernstein said, “but it turned out to be way, way, way tougher than we’d ever thought.” The casing is made of high-density polycarbonate similar to Nalgene bottles, which the very technological Bernstein calls “crazy strong.” Sphero has been dropped 25 feet (7.6 meters) onto carpet, thrown and driven by incompetent television hosts to no ill effect.
But can it pass the ultimate test? The ultimate challenge for a ball that can connect to a computer? The Internet wants to know: Can Sphero take on my cat? “Absolutely,” said Bernstein. “I don’t think there’s any possible way a cat would hurt it.” Straight from the co-founder’s mouth. Cat-loving Internet, let the ridiculous videos commence.
Back that app up, Sphero.
To get Sphero to do anything remotely cool, with or without your cat’s involvement, you gotta have apps. Right out of the box, Sphero comes with an app that lets you control it and at least get some basic cat-freaking-out responses from it.
Sphero’s makers at Orbotix aren’t really into making the apps themselves. They want to go further with the robotic stuff, so they’re leaving the control of Sphero up to you. There are already games like Sphero Golf, Sphero Chromo, Last Fish and Sphero Macrolab, with new apps being developed all the time. The folks at Orbotix didn’t even know about Shapesynth, which creates sounds based on Sphero’s movements, until it came out.
Not only does Orbotix put all the information an app developer would need on its Web site, but it also puts on a bunch of hackathons across the country. It was during the Boulder, Colo., hackathon that President Obama’s path crossed with Sphero’s.
“It’s all free,” Bernstein said. “Anybody who wants to come, beginners to experienced programmers and artists, can come hang out and build some apps over the weekend. We have a small prize at the end of the weekend, and then we give them four weeks to polish their apps before we give the big prizes away.”
How big are those prizes? How big do you think $13,000 in cash is? Because that’s what Orbotix gives away at each hackathon.
The Boulder event has so far brought two apps to the app store: One is an Etch-a-Sketch app where you tilt Sphero to draw and shake Sphero to clear the screen; the other is Monster Bash, where your Sphero and another player’s Sphero don virtual monster suits and chase each other around until one bashes into the other. “It’s basically dog fighting,” said Bernstein. There’s no limit on the number of Spheros that can play.
Want to create your own cat-harassment game for Sphero? Hit up Spheroverse.com. You can see what the hackathon people have already come up with and find a Sphero-shaped hole for your own app-developing heart to fill.
For more Detail: How Sphero Works
