Lord Robot

Richard Garriott has always been a bit of an odd duck, and he gets more odd every day. When traveling away from his Austin-based business, the game developer uses an internet-linked, fully mobile robot as his telepresence in the office.

At any point in time, QB60, with Garriott at the controls up in New York, quietly slips up behind an employee, parks itself and begins to stare. Sooner or later, the “boss” will speak. The employee speaks back and the next thing you know, a conversation is under way. Other times, Garriott will sit in on employee meetings in QB60’s body.

A bit creepy, perhaps. But that's Lord British for you. What's more amusing is his original reason for purchasing the robot:

Last summer, the man married the woman of his dreams at a 500-year-old chateau in France. He desperately wanted his mother to attend, but she didn’t feel up to the rigors of international travel.

So the bridegroom bought himself a $15,000 gizmo from a company called Anybots, Inc ., a California outfit. That gizmo is a personal avatar, an ever-present telepresence, or what most of us would recognize as a robot .

It wanders around much like the two-wheeled self-balancing Segway personal transport machine. But it also does much more. Equipped with two cameras, a microphone and a speaker, it enables one to use a laptop computer to operate the machine from anywhere one can find a functional broadband Internet connection.

So, Garriott put a laptop in his mother’s hands as she sat in comfort in Las Vegas, Nev. Then he put the robot, decked out in a cardboard cutout of Mom, smack dab in the middle of his big fat French wedding.

“One of the best scenes at the wedding,” he said, “was my mother, you know, fully dressed at the end of the evening on the dance floor, on the disco dance floor, you know, with that nice parquet floor, us in our wedding gown and wedding attire, all of our friends dressed to the teeth, colored laser lights going all over the place -- and my mother here as the robot, jamming down with all the youngsters on the dance floor.

“They had no idea that there was really somebody driving and that it was my mother in Las Vegas who could see and hear and talk,” Garriott went on.

“And so we had people going up and signing their name on her little cardboard cutout and only then were their ears right next to the speaker and so when they would sign on her [cutout], she would go, 'Giggle, giggle, giggle, oh that tickles.' And they would all, you know, kind of stand back,” he said, doing a bit of giggling, himself.

Mini-Mom!