Ugobe’s Pleo

Caleb Chung, the guy who created the Furby, has spent the last five years working on a sequel, which will be available in time for the 2006 holiday season — the Pleo,

It’ll retail for about $200, but it is equipped with 40 sensors and 14 servo joints controlled by algorithms designed to make it react in a lifelike manner to its environment.

How well do they succeed? Check out the video of Pleo’s debut at DEMO 2006.

I’ll take two.

ROM, The Space Knight

Lee Seitz has an authoritative site on Rom, The Space Knight, a Parker Brothers robot action figure that was pretty cool even though it flopped. I had a couple of these when I was a kid. Looks like go for about $200 if you can find them MIB on EBay.

It wasn’t that cool of a toy.

There was also a tie-in with a Rom comic from Marvel which ran for 75 issues. Hey, maybe someone should ask Michael Brian Bendis if he’s interested in doing an Ultimate Rom!

They’re Action Figures!

Okay, this was a very bizarre story that appeared on Reuters’ wire this week,

A man caught having sex with a blow-up doll in a busy public shopping arcade had to be physically parted from his rubber lover and escorted away, police in Stuttgart [Germany] say.

No word on if the man offered up as a defense that it was in fact an action figure, not a doll.

Source:

German caught having sex with doll. Reuters, September 1, 2004.