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I've seen telepresence products for over a decade. Has the trend ever really taken off?
No, it's still very niche. Suitable, Double, Ohmni, Anybots, GoBe, etc. have failed to take the world by storm.
The battery and hardware were the bottle neck much like processing power for machine learning. George is trying to a fun opensource project but not be toy and that's very important.
We tried out one of these telepresence bots in our (open-plan) office. It quickly became universally hated and soon kicked out because its speaker somehow had a completely distorted spectrum, with shrill, emphasized high frequencies additionally full of low-bit-rate artifacts that carried across the whole floor.
This is different from a telepresence bot. In fact, it is necessary to have been following comma.ai for sometime to understand what it is.

Awesome

Ah, great. So… what is it?
Apparently it's an... indoor self-driving car? For software testing??

> The comma body runs our open source software, openpilot. From openpilot’s perspective, the comma body is a car. It runs the same camera and logging software, so we’ll be able to learn from the fleet of bodies in the same way we learn from our fleet of cars.

https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/

Ah. I can see why a cheap to log and test self-driving could be desirable.
It is an open source robot with a highly capable, custom and transparent computer as a controller at a fair price

It can be whatever your imagination allows it

An immediate application I can think of is that it can be used in college for the robotics course

$3000 is a fair price? To me it seems excessive but maybe I am missing something.
It’s $999.
It doesn't come with a Comma Three which is required for the device to function, costing an additional $2000. $3000 in total.
Oh wow that is pretty misleading.
I’d like to see a project like this that adapted comma.ai into a wearable vest for blind people. It would signal through haptic vibration to help avoid walking into obstacles.
Have you seen orcam projects ?
I sincerely hope that telepresence robots are not the future of people. What a ridiculous slogan.
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