The lack of enough initiatives/start-ups in Telepresence/Virtual Presence world has always surprised me. After all, people started working remotely for a while now and they need is the tools to make this experience better. The biggest tool to me is Telepresence robots.
Unfortunately most of the attempts that I have seen so far has one fundamental problem; they are not affordable. I will not get into too much details but for instance, a robot from Double Robotics costs you $2,499 as of today. I find it unnecessarily expensive, given that the robot has only two moving parts and you will have to provide the brain of the machine with an IPad. The actual price goes up to $3,000 when the price of IPad is included.
As I have given up all hope, I found this new startup; Romotive . Apparently, this whole project started as Kickstarter project and they started manufacturing in bulk couple years ago. I will go ahead and be upfront about this; this is not designed as virtual presence robot. It is intended to be a robot pet (from out of space) that is supposed to interact with you. However, this doesn't mean that it has tele-conference capabilities. And the best part is... yes its price. It is only $149. It is one twentieth of what Double Robotics costs you. Yes, it is smaller in size, but I don't think the price difference could be explained merely by the difference in size. If these guys are able to build this product for $149, I am sure a bigger version of this tool could be built at an affordable price.
As it is the case with any other product, the more competition there is, cheaper the products get. Hopefully, we will see more competitive products being released as entrepreneurs realized the untapped potential in this market.
