Where did they actually all go?

A commercial about new music robot called Rolly from Sony attracted me. It was creative invention. The fact what this music robot can do surprises me. How did they get this unique idea. The fact that it was Sony was no surprise coz this japanese company is one of the leader in electronic industries. They invent walkman, AFAIK, and it become very popular electronic device which also inspired other portable music/mp3 player such as iPod.

The idea of this Rolly in my point of view is not too complicated. This robot moves and display lights according to the voices of the played music and it acts in a realtime way. This similar behavior actually has existed for few years. it is implemented in media player softwares such as Windows media player (WMP). the only different thing is in WMP the behavior is not manifested by moving your PCs or laptops, which is will be quite annoying if it does so, but by moving abstract images with many different colors also this movement and color changing are based on the current voice of the music. The only fancy idea that Sony implemented is how to transform this moving abstract images and changing colors into a robot movement. Again, this is just my opinion.

I wonder how many researches involved in this Rolly project. Although the basic idea of acting based on the music already existed but transforming it into robotic movement is not so easy. It could be a lot researches and patents used. Having some friends doing research in Japan makes me know what they are doing and where those researches results will go. AFATK the results will be patented and most probably will be used for industrial needs. Many industries in Japan could reap benefits of these results. And if it's patented than the one who hold the patent can also get some money

Unlike Japanese university's tradition which patented they researches result, this university is a big fans of opensource. Which means a lot of their researches results go for opensources aka free. Well at least that happens in my research group, afaik, especially the one that I have finished which is very tiny mini research :p Don't know why they don't patent may be because they are too rich or maybe they are a faithful follower of opensource and have motto "Human Knowledge Belong to The World".

I don't hate opensource. I kinda like it actually coz I'm not afford to buy very expensive softwares :D But people have to make money, right? And sometimes charging from support we offer for opensource products is not enough. So I can completely understand proprietary software and I won't accuse them as demon and so on. They're just trying to feed their families after all. But for endors that are too rich I think it is a nice attitude to share their knowledge through opensource like google and IBM.

What a post. from Robot, sony until google and IBM. Weird. Ok It's late, just came back from library and it's 1.30 am. Ow here are the commercial of Rolly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTxdKi77G20&NR=1

PS. I still dont know how to embed youtube video in blogspot :P