A few years ago when I decided to become an independent game developer, I realized that I was spending a lot of time home alone in isolation. I was living in a place that was cheaper, and far away from many of my friends. I've always been anxious when it comes to social interaction and making new friends, so the isolation grew.
As I started getting lonely, I decided it would be fun if I literally made a friend that my other friends could access remotely and hang out with me. After a few months, I had my first prototype, a robot made out of legos that could stream video and be controlled remotely through various video streaming platforms like Twitch or Facebook. I even hooked it up to Twitter. I also added text to speech from the chat to the robot. It was a blast, and I've tens of thousands of users come hang out at my place via various robots I've built.
Now that the pandemic has hit, I find myself isolated again. This time instead of building just a robot, I've built a platform for sharing real time remote control of robots over the web. It's kinda like slack, but for robots. The sharing part is important. Accessibility and compatibility are both key components. My MVP for https://Remo.TV already has ultra low latency video, an API and other libraries for supporting a wide range of hardware and devices, and it's all open source. You can share your robot with just your friends, or crowd source the controls by making your robot public on Remo. I can easily see this having utility far beyond just the social aspect.
To me the internet is a window, and we've been trapped on our side of the glass. My goal with Remo is to allow us to reach out, and truly interact with the world from pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Comments