Fourteen years ago, the CG wizards at Pixar made us all believe a faceless desk lamp could be enormously expressive and incredibly cute. Apple, with its mind set on home robotics, shows us how such an adorable lamp would look like in real life. The tech giant has been working on a lamp that’s a little goofy while it tries to respond to your requests, and it may be the one Apple Intelligence-enabled device I want in my life—more than any AI assistant on my iPhone.
Apple’s Machine Learning Research division posted a relatively short research paper to Arxiv preprint repository last month detailing its “expressive and functional movement design for non-anthropomorphic robot.” MacRumors spotted the article and uploaded a YouTube video of the expressive lamp in action. It’s a device that’s immediately reminiscent of Pixar’s mascot Luxo Jr., and it’s somehow just as cute. Engineers gestured to get the lamp to move forward or look in a particular direction. Rather than simply moving linearly, the lamp acted equal parts confused and curious, with various states of “attention,” “attitude,” and “expression,” according to the paper. Apple calls this framework ELEGNT, a clumsy acronym for “expressive and functional movement design for non-anthropomorphic robot.”
You know what, Apple may be on the money here. The expressive robot is far more entertaining than one that merely does what you tell it to. In one highlight, the robot arm tried to extend to look at a note that its arm couldn’t reach, before shaking its head in dejection and apologizing with an AI-generated voice. In another part of the video, a user asked the lamp for the weather. The robot looked outside, looked back, then told the forecast (the action was time the AI uses to send to a generative model and process that information). It then asked if it was invited on a hiking trip with its owner, then looked disappointed when it was told no.
The tricky thing is to make it functional while still having the so-called “attitude.” I remember the struggles of playing The Last Guardian on PlayStation 4, where negotiating with a giant beast that was as likely to follow players’ orders as an actual puppy was at times endearing, yet tedious and occasionally rage-inducing. The other aspect to this “ELEGNT” device is whether the expressive movements add to the emotionality of what’s otherwise staid and boring speech you typically get from AI chatbots. No matter what, the bot is still just playing pretend. The only thing that matters is if it’s convincing enough you can forget its speech and body language are generated based on algorithms.
There’s more than a little speculation about how Apple wants to intrude into smart home tech that’s more than just another HomePod. The latest rumors from trusted sources at Bloomberg claim Apple’s engineers are crafting a touchscreen at the end of a robotic arm. The arm is supposed to follow you and respond to you, hands free with the help of AI. It’s the kind of idea that’s neat in concept, though cost and practicability inevitably hinder these kinds of Jetsons-style future tech.
These expressive interactions may set any upcoming smart home tech apart from the many other smart screens on the market. Apple’s engineers heavily cite a 2014 paper in the Journal of Human-Robot Interaction by Guy Hoffman and Wendy Ju, both associate professors at Cornell University. Many of those technology tests for that earlier research were done with a “Wizard of Oz” technique—essentially there’s a “man behind the curtain” controlling the bot. With the wide-ranging improvements in robotics and AI, we should be able to see how this works when nobody’s controlling these interactions (though nobody apparently told the Tesla team that).
More recent reports note Apple is developing a smart home camera and another smart home display to compete with AI-enabled Google Nest cameras or Amazon’s Echo Show. This new drive for smart home tech will likely push the Apple Intelligence angle even further, though inevitably Apple hopes to entice customers to the warm bosom of its walled garden. Why buy any other brand that may or may not work with Apple, when you could just buy Apple (though at a premium price).
