EG 2007
Caleb Chung: Playtime with Pleo, your robotic dinosaur friend
Filmed:
Readability: 3
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Pleo the robot dinosaur acts like a living pet -- exploring, cuddling, playing, reacting and learning. Inventor Caleb Chung talks about Pleo and his wild toy career at EG07, on the week that Pleo shipped to stores for the first time.
Caleb Chung - Toy designer
Caleb Chung dreams up toys that interact with children. He's the inventor of Furby, a talking (and listening) robotic furball that sold some 50 million units in the late '90s. His newest plaything: Pleo the adorable robot dinosaur. Full bio
Caleb Chung dreams up toys that interact with children. He's the inventor of Furby, a talking (and listening) robotic furball that sold some 50 million units in the late '90s. His newest plaything: Pleo the adorable robot dinosaur. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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I'm a, or was, or kind of am a toy designer.
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And before I was a toy designer, oh, I was a mime, a street mime, actually.
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And then I was an entertainer, I guess.
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And before that, I was a silversmith, and before that, I was --
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I was out of the house at about 15 and a half,
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and I never wound up going into college.
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I didn't really -- I didn't see the point at the time.
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I do now, after learning about all the quantum stuff.
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(Laughter)
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It's really cool.
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Anyway, I wanted to show you a little bit about the world of toy design,
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at least from my small aperture of the world.
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This is a video I made when I first started doing toy design.
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I'm in my garage, making weird stuff.
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And then you go to these toy companies
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and there's some guy across the table,
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and he goes, "Pass. Pass. Pass."
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You know, you think it's so cool, but they --
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anyway, I made this little tape that I'd always show when I go in.
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This is the name of my company, Giving Toys.
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So I used to work at Mattel, actually.
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And after I left Mattel, I started all these hamburger makers,
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and then got the license to make the maker.
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So this is a hamburger maker that
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you take the peanut butter and stuff and you put it in there, and it makes --
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and this is a French fry maker, little, tiny food you can eat.
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I beat up the pasta maker to make that.
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Then this is a McNugget maker, I think.
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This, now that's the McNugget maker,
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and this is a -- this is my oldest daughter making a McApple Pie.
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And let's see, you can make the pie and cinnamon and sugar,
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and then you eat, and you eat, and you eat, and you --
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she's about 300 pounds now.
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No, she's not, she's beautiful.
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This is how they looked when they came out at the end.
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These are a -- this is like a 15 million dollar line.
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And it got me through some -- I didn't make any royalties on this, but it got me through.
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Next is a compilation of a bunch of stuff.
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That was a missile foam launcher that didn't get sold.
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This is a squishy head, for no apparent reason.
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This is some effects that I did for "Wig, Rattle and Roll."
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That was a robot eye thing controlling it in the back.
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That paid the rent for about a month.
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This is a walking Barbie -- I said, "Oh, this is it!"
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And they go, "Oh, that's really nice," and out it goes.
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So this is some fighting robots. I thought everyone would want these.
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They fight, they get back up, you know? Wouldn't this be cool?
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And they made it into a toy, and then they dropped it like a hot rock.
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They're pretty cool.
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This is a-- we're doing some flight-testing
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on my little pug, seeing if this can really grab.
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It does pretty good.
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I'm using little phone connectors to make them so they can spin.
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It's how they, see, have those album things -- kids don't know what they are.
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This is a clay maker.
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You know, I said -- I went to Play-Doh,
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and said, "Look, I can animate this."
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They said, "Don't talk to us about Play-Doh."
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And then, I made a Lego animator.
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I thought, this would be so great!
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And you know, Lego -- don't take Legos to Lego.
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That's the answer. They know everything about it.
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Then I started doing animatronics.
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I loved dinosaurs.
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I used to be in the film business, kind of,
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and actually, Nicholas Negroponte saw this when I was, like, 12,
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and anyway, so then they said, "No, you have to make two and they have to fight."
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You know, how -- why would a kid want a dinosaur?
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This is me using [unclear] or 3-D Studio, back in the '80s.
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That's David Letterman.
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You can see how old this stuff is.
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That's my youngest cousin.
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This is a segment called, "Dangerous Toys You Won't See at Christmas."
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We had my first saw blade launcher and we had a flamethrower chair.
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My career basically peaked here.
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And in the back are foam-core cutouts of the people who couldn't make it to the show.
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This is MEK going through a windshield wiper motor.
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So this is a -- I used to kind of be an actor.
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And I'm really not very good at it.
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But the -- this is a guy named Dr. Yatz,
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who would take toys apart and show kids about engineering.
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And you can see the massively parallel processing Nintendos there.
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And over to the left is a view master of the CD-ROM.
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And a guy named Stan Reznikov did this as a pilot.
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This is a -- you can see the little window there.
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You can actually see the Steadicam with a bubble on the bottom.
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You see the keyboard strapped to my wrist.
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Way ahead of my time here.
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(Video) I'm getting dizzy ...
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Narrator: I love toys!
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Caleb Chung: That's all I wanted to say there. I love toys.
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OK, so, so that was a, that was the first kind of a --
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that was the first batch of products.
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Most of them did not go.
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You get one out of 20, one out of 30 products.
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And every now and then, we do something like a,
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you know, an automated hair wrap machine, you know,
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that tangles your hair and pulls your scalp out, and --
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and we'd make some money on that, you know. And we'd give it out.
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But eventually, we left L.A., and we moved to Idaho,
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where there was actually a lot of peace and quiet.
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And I started working on this project
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-- oh, I have to tell you about this real quick.
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Throughout this whole thing, making toys,
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I think there is a real correlation with innovation and art and science.
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There's some kind of a blend that happens
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that allows, you know, to find innovation.
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And I tried to sum this up in some kind of symbol
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that means something, to me anyway.
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And so, art and science have a kind of dynamic balance,
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that's where I think innovation happens.
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And actually, this is, to me, how I can come up with great ideas.
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But it's not how you actually get leverage.
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Actually, you have to put a circle around that, and call it business.
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And those three together, I think, give you leverage in the world.
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But moving on.
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So, this is a quick tale I'm going to tell. This is the Furby tale.
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As he said, I was co-inventor of the Furby.
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I did the body and creature -- well, you'll see.
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So by way of showing you this, you can kind of
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get an understanding of what it is to,
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hopefully, try to create robotic life forms, or technology
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that has an emotional connection with the user.
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So this is my family.
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This is my wife, Christi, and Abby, and Melissa,
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and my 17-year-old now, Emily, who was just a pack of trouble.
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All right, there's that robot again.
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I came out of the movie business, as I said,
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and I said, let's make these animatronic robots.
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Let's make these things.
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And so I've always had a big interest in this.
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This one actually didn't go anywhere,
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but I got my feet wet doing this.
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This is a smaller one, and I have a little moving torso on there.
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A little, tiny guy walks along. More servo drives,
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lots of servo hacking, lots of mechanical stuff.
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There's another one.
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He actually has skeletor legs, I think, he's wearing there.
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Oh, this is a little pony, little pony -- very cute little thing.
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The point of showing these is I've always been interested in little artificial life pieces.
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So the challenge was -- I worked for Microsoft for a little bit,
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working on the Microsoft Barney.
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And this is a -- you know, the purple dinosaur with kind of bloat wear.
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And, you know, they had lots, just lots of stuff in there that you didn't need, I thought.
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And then Microsoft can just fill a, you know, a warehouse
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full of this stuff and see if they sell.
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So it's a really strange business model compared to coming from a toy company.
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But anyway, a friend of mine and I, Dave Hampton,
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decided to see if we could do like a single-cell organism.
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What's the fewest pieces we could use to make a little life form?
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And that's our little, thirty-cent Mabuchi motor.
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And so, I have all these design books,
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like I'm sure many of you have.
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And throughout the books -- this is the first page on Furby --
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I have kind of the art and science.
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I have the why over here, and the how over there.
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I try to do a lot of philosophy, a lot of thinking about all of these projects.
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Because they're not just "bing" ideas;
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you have to really dig deep in these things.
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So there's some real pseudo-code over here,
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and getting the idea of different kind of drives, things like that.
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And originally, Furby only had two eyes and some batteries on the bottom.
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And then we said, well, you're going to feed him,
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and he needs to talk, and it got more complicated.
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And then I had to figure out how I'm going to use that one motor
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to make the eyes move, and the ears move,
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and the body to move, and the mouth to move.
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And, you know, I want to make it blink
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and do all that at the same time.
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Well, I came up with this kind of linear
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expression thing with these cams and feedback. And that worked pretty well.
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Then I started to get a little more realistic
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and I have to start drawing the stuff.
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And there's my "note to self" at the top:
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"lots of engineering."
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So that turned out to be a little more than true.
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There's my first exploded view and all the little pieces
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and the little worm drive and all that stuff.
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And then I've got to start building it,
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so this is the real thing.
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I get up and start cutting my finger and gluing things together.
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And that's my little workshop.
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And there's the first little cam that drove Furby.
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And there's Furby on the half shell.
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You can see the little BB in the box is my tilt sensor.
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I just basically gnawed all this stuff out of plastic.
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So there's the back of his head with a billion holes in it.
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And there I am. I'm done. There's my little Furby.
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No, it's a little robot on heroin or something, I think.
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(Laughter)
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So right now, you see, I love little robots.
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So my wife says, "Well, you may like it, but nobody else will."
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So she comes to the rescue.
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This is my wife Christi, who is just, you know,
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my muse and my partner for eternity here.
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And she does drawings, right?
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She's an actual, you know, artist.
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And she starts doing all these different drawings
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and does color patterns and coloring books.
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And I like the guy with the cigar at the bottom there.
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He didn't test so well, but I like him.
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And then she started doing these other images.
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At that time, Beanie Babies was a big hit,
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and we thought, we'll do a bunch of different ones.
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So here's a little pink one, a little pouf on his head.
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And here's -- this didn't do so well in testing either, I don't know why.
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There's my favorite, Demon Furby.
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That was a good one.
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Anyway, finally settled on kind of this kind of a look,
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little poufy body, a little imaginary character.
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And there he is, a little bush baby on -- caught in the headlights there.
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I actually went to Toys"R"Us, got a little furry cat,
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ripped it apart and made this.
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And since then, every time I come home from Toys"R"Us
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with dolls or something, they disappear from my desk
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and they get hidden in the house.
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I have three girls and they just, they --
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it's like a rescue animal thing they're going there.
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(Laughter)
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So, a little tether coming off,
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it's just a control for the Fur's mouth and his eyes.
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It's just a little server control and I made a little video going:
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"Hi, my name's Furby, and I'm good,"
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you know, and then I'd reach my hand.
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He'd -- you can tickle him. When I put my hand up,
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"Ha, ha, ha, ha" and that's how we sold him.
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And Hasbro actually said, I meant Tiger Electronics at the time,
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said, "Yeah, we want to do this.
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We have, you know, 13 weeks or something to Toy Fair,
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and we're going to hire you guys to do this."
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And so Dave and I got working.
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Mostly me, because it was all mechanics at this point.
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So now I have to really figure out all kinds of stuff
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I don't know how to do.
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And I started working with Solid Works
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and a whole other group to do that.
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And we started --
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this was way back before there was really much SLA going on,
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not a lot of rapid prototyping.
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We certainly didn't have the money to do this.
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They only paid me, like, a little bit of money to do this,
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so I had to call a friend of a friend
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who was running the GM prototype plant, SLA plant, that was down.
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And they said, "Yeah, well, we'll run them."
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So they ran all the shells for us, which was nice of them.
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And the cams I got cut at Hewlett Packard.
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We snuck in on the weekend.
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And so we just had a disc of the files.
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But they have a closed system, so you couldn't print the things out on the machine.
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So we actually printed them out on clear and taped them on the monitors.
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And on the weekend we ran the parts for that.
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So this is how they come out close to the end.
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And then they looked like little Garfields there.
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Eight months later -- you may remember this,
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this was a -- total, total, total chaos.
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For a while, they were making two million Furbys a month.
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They actually wound up doing about 40 million Furbys.
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I -- it's unbelievable how -- I don't know how that can be.
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And Hasbro made about, you know, a billion and a half dollars.
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And I just a little bit on each one.
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So full circle -- why do I do this?
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Why do you, you know, try to do this stuff?
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And it's, of course, for your kids.
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And there's my youngest daughter with her Furbys.
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And she still actually has those.
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So I kind of retired, and we're already living in paradise
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up in Boise, on a river, you know. So
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and then I started another company called Toy Innovation
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and we did some projects with Mattel with
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actually with a lady who's here, Ivy Ross,
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and we did Miracle Moves Baby,
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made it in Wired magazine, did a bunch of other stuff.
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And then I started another company.
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We did a little hand-held device for teens that could hook up to the Internet,
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won "Best Innovations" at CES,
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but really I kind of slowed down and said, OK,
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I just ... After a while, I had this old tape of this dinosaur,
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and I gave it to this guy, and this other guy saw it,
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and then people started to want to do it.
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And they said they'd spend all this time.
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So I said, "OK, let's try to do this dinosaur project."
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The crazy idea is we're going to try to clone a dinosaur
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as much as we can with today's technology.
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And it's not really -- but as close as we can do.
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And we're going to try to really pull this off,
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intentfully try to make something that seems like it's alive.
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Not a robot that kind of does, but let's really go for it.
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So I picked a Camarasaurus,
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because the Camarasaurus was the most abundant of the sauropods in North America.
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And you could actually find full fossil evidence of these.
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That's a juvenile.
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And so we actually went in.
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There's a book called "Walking on Eggshells,"
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where they found actual sauropod skin in Patagonia.
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And the picture from the book, so when I --
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I told the sculptor to use this bump pattern, whatever you can to copy that.
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Very, very obsessive.
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There's a kind of truncated Camarasaurus skeleton,
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but the geometry's correct.
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And then I went in, and measured all the geometry
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because I figured, hey, biomimicry.
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If I do it kind of right, it might move kind of like the real thing.
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So there's the motor.
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And about this time, you know, all these other people are starting to help.
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Here's an example of what we did with the skull.
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There's the skull, there's my drawing of a skull.
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There's kind of the skin version of the soft tissue.
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There's the mechanism that would go in there,
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kind of a Geneva drive.
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There's some Solid Works versions of it.
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Here's some SLA parts of the same thing.
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And then, these are really crude pieces. We were just doing some tests here.
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There's the skull, pretty much the same shape as the Camarasaurus.
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There's a photorealistic eye behind a lens.
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And there's kind of the first exploded view, or see-through view.
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There's the first SLA version, and it already kind of has the feel,
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it has kind of a cuteness already.
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And the thing about blending science and art
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in this multidisciplinary stuff is you can do a robot,
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and then you go back and do the shape,
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and then you go back and forth.
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The servos in the front legs, we had to shape those like muscles.
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They had to fit within the envelope.
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There was a tremendous amount of work to get all that working right.
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All the neck and the tail are cable,
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so it moves smoothly and organically.
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And then, of course, you're not done yet.
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You have to get the look for the skin.
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The skin's a whole another thing, probably the hardest part.
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So you hire artists, and you try to get the look and feel
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of the character.
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Now, this is not -- we're character designers, right?
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And we're still trying to keep with the real character.
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So, now you go back and you cover the whole thing with clay.
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Now you start doing the sculpture for this.
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And you can see we got a guy from --
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who's just a fanatic about dinosaurs
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to do the sculpting for us,
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down to the spoon-shaped teeth and everything.
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And then more sculpting, and then more sculpting,
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and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting.
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And then, four years and 10 million dollars later,
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we have a little Pleo.
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John, do you want to bring him up?
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John Sosoka is our CTO, and is really the man
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that's done most of the work with our 40-person company.
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I'd like to give John a hand. He never gets recognition. This is John Sosoka.
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(Applause)
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So, thank you, John, thank you,
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and get back to work, all right, man?
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All right --
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(Laughter)
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-- no, it's very painful, so --
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(Laughter)
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-- these are little Pleos and you can probably see them.
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This -- I on purpose -- they go through life stages.
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So when you first get them, they're babies.
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And you -- more you have them, kind of the older they get,
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and they kind of learn through their behavior.
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So this one, this one's actually asleep, and -- hang on.
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Pleo, wake up. Pleo, come on.
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So this guy's listening to my voice here.
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But they have 40 sensors all over their body.
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They have seven processors, they have 14 motors,
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they have --
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but you don't care, do you?
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They're just cute, right? That's the idea, that's the idea.
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So you see -- hey, come on. Hey, did you feel that?
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There's something big and loud over here.
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Hey.
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(Laughter)
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That's good, wake up, wake up, wake up.
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Yeah, they're like kids, you know.
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You, yeah, yeah. Okay, he's hungry.
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I'll show you what he's been doing for, for four years.
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Here, here, here. Have some money, Pleo.
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(Laughter)
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There you go.
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That's what the investors think, that it's just --
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(Laughter)
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-- right, right. So they're really sweet little guys.
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And we're hoping that -- you know,
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our belief is that humans need to feel empathy towards things
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in order to be more human.
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And we think we can help that out by having
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little creatures that you can love.
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Now these are not robots, they're kind of lovebots, you know.
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They do change over time.
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But mostly they evoke a feeling of caring.
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And we have a -- I have a little something here.
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Now I do want to say that, you know, Ugobe is not there yet.
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We've just opened the door, and it's for all of you to step through it.
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We did include some things that are hopefully useful.
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Excuse me, Pleo.
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They -- he has a USB and he has a SD card,
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so it's completely open architecture.
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So anyone can plug him -- (Applause) -- thank you.
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This is John over here.
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Anyone can take Pleo and they can totally redo his personality.
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You can make him bipolar, or as someone said, a --
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(Laughter) --
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you can change his homeostatic drives, or whatever you want to call them.
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Kids can just drag and drop, put in new sounds.
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We -- actually, it's very hard to keep people from doing this.
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We have one animator who's taken it and
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he's done a take on the Budweiser beer commercial,
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and they're going, "Whassup," you know?
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(Laughter)
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You -- so it's -- yes, he likes that.
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So they're a handful. We hope you get one.
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I don't know what I'm missing to say,
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but as a last thing, I'd like to say is that
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if we continue along this path, we are designing our children's best friends.
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And there's a lot of social responsibility in that.
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That's why Pleo's soft and gentle and loving.
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And so I just -- I hope we all dream well.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Caleb Chung - Toy designerCaleb Chung dreams up toys that interact with children. He's the inventor of Furby, a talking (and listening) robotic furball that sold some 50 million units in the late '90s. His newest plaything: Pleo the adorable robot dinosaur.
Why you should listen
Caleb Chung came to toy inventing with the standard background: a career as a mime, comedian and stunt man. A prolific creator of toys from the get-go (he invented some classic McDonald's Happy Meal giveaways), he became a toy-design rockstar in the 1990s with the Furby . Essentially a talking mogwai, the Furby spoke its own language, could communicate with other Furbys, and connected with its owner in a way that sold tens of millions of the dolls. (Versions of the Furby are still in production worldwide -- and are a magnet for tinkerers.)
Retiring to Idaho after this roaring success, Chung started tinkering with another design that uses sophisticated robotics to evoke a deep emotional bond. The Pleo is the result, a supercute baby dinosaur that begins its emotional and intellectual development when you pull it out of the box. After a few deadline problems (centered around the challenge of fitting 37 sensors, 14 motors and 7 microcontrollers inside a realistic dinosaur skin), Chung's company Ugobe (now Pleoworld) shipped Pleo for Christmas 2007.
Caleb Chung | Speaker | TED.com