Sam Altman: AI Has Not Had Its iPhone Moment “And I think this is mostly a product failure. The phase that we’re in now reminds me of smartphones before the iPhone. I was an early adopter. I had a Palm Treo in 2003 or 2004. A lot of the technology was there. It was missing multitouch, but mostly it was missing the product ideas that made the iPhone the iPhone. I feel like we are now in a world where we have all of the technological pieces, but we have not had the iPhone moment of completely changing how someone interfaces with technology.”

time to vibe code some stuff on this little thing it has: - multi-touch screen color display - camera - wifi + bluetooth - microphone - speaker - microSD card reader - proximity + ambient light sensor - accelerometer + gyroscope - magnetometer (??) - usb-c and a built-in battery so I can take it anywhere

They turned a Baymax costume into robot skin! 🎈 Whole-body contact with a humanoid is usually handled one of two ways, and both give something up. Collision avoidance keeps a comfortable geometric margin, but once contact actually happens it has nothing to offer. Robotic skin measures contact directly, except thin skin leaves almost no margin, so a slow reaction or a force past the material's elastic limit becomes a real problem. A team from KAIST, DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology) and UIUC inflated the skin instead! 🇰🇷 The envelope is a single-piece commercial Baymax costume. Inflating it puts a large standoff distance between the contact surface and the rigid frame underneath, which recovers the geometric margin of collision avoidance. Then they put the sensors inside it. Alright, let's have a look at what's inside. Time-of-flight sensors pointed into a sealed, controlled volume avoid most of the errors that come with perception in open environments. And because the whole surface is compliant, even a small object deforms a large area, so it registers clearly. → 116 ToF sensors across 16 modules, tilted 45° for 360° coverage per body segment, at 20 Hz with no blind spots → An MLP predicts what the skin surface should look like from joint angles alone → Contact is detected as the deviation between the predicted and observed point clouds, → Validated on single-point contact, multi-touch, and full-body hugging Hugging is one of the experimental conditions, and it's the hardest case here as it is a distributed contact across many segments at once. Which is exactly what you'd want from a Baymax, I guess :D 🔗 Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →