You like robots? You’re gonna love this. This is an iPad app all about robots. Just robots, nothing but robots, loads and loads and loads of robots. It’s made of robots, in the same way we are made of meat. It’s fantastic.
The Robots app is brought to you by the same people who make the IEEE Spectrum robotics blog, which is one of the best places to get robot news on the web.
The app pulls together a vast amount of data about 100 or so of the best and most interesting robots around at the moment.
For every robot there’s a detailed write-up, a specs sheet, a series of photos and interactive images (like see-inside, or spin-it-round stuff), plus embedded videos from the web. You can spend a long time exploring the history, the mechanics and the capabilities of each and every robot. It’s very complete.
Your opinions count, too. You can add robots as favorites, rate them with stars or on a “creepiness” scale. Everything is beautifully presented in a gorgeous orange-and-white on black color scheme. It looks great. It’s very engaging, too. You can quite easily lose yourself for hours inside the wonderful world of robots and robotic technology. There’s so much amazing research being done in this field. Spend just a short while exploring it all inside this app, and you’ll really start to wonder what’s coming next in terms of consumer-level robots. That Robot and Frank movie will just be the start.
There’s more: the news section is up-to-date with daily updates. The text-heavy “Learn” section goes into much more detail about robots and includes a fantastic timeline going all the way back to the 15th century. Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of something resembling a robot – or maybe an exoskeleton – 500 years ago. Pretty cool.
The robots app costs $2 which is a very fair price for what’s on offer. It will appeal most to kids of a certain age, but also to kids of all ages. My son and I both share a fascination with robots and we enjoyed sitting down and slurping in all the information this app had to offer. True, you could probably find most of it on the web for free, but you’d have to know what to look for and waste hours finding the right data. This app puts it all at your fingertips.
Source: IEEE
