Hey guys! I've just been musing about what makes people like Pleos when the idea of a dinosaur as a robotic companion/pet seems really strange at first. When I learned about Pleos around 2010, I thought the idea of making a dinosaur as a robotic companion was really weird and wondered why the company didn’t make something like a dog that most people accept as cute and friendly. I honestly ended up reselling my first Pleo because I was so used to robot dogs or cats and found the concept of a dinosaur really odd and even a bit creepy, but I eventually started collecting Pleos again and have realized that I was thinking about it in the wrong way beforehand.
If Ugobe had tried to make life-like dog robots that need to be taken care of and will cuddle and fall asleep in your arms, but have fake fur, large plastic eyes, play recordings of barks, constantly hum with the whir of motors and freeze at random moments for nearly a minute at a time, people would likely find that extremely unsettling and it would fall right down into the darkest depths of the uncanny valley. While there are toys like this for younger age groups, when it gets to the point that the company is trying to make it realistic and life-like, they run the risk of falling short and being ridiculed for trying to replace real pets with robots. By using dinosaurs however, they escape most of this. No one has actually seen a dinosaur in real life since they’re long extinct, but we’ve all grown up with toy dinosaurs and drawings of them. We have no living example to compare it to, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s stealing the place of a dog or just falling short of imitating a living creature. By replacing something that is long gone rather than imitating modern day pets, Pleo is able to be something magical. The eyes are still eerily close to a Furby’s and it can be a bit creepy to see seems and cameras in the skin of something that almost looks alive, but at the same time, tons of people who normally dislike robots will warm up to Pleos extremely quickly and be willing to pet them or even hold them in their arms.
While Ugobe did go bankrupt, the Pleo was picked up by Innvo and seems to be still selling well, along with having online communities dedicated to it like this one. I feel like the choice of making Pleo a dinosaur is what's keeping it alive today. When I bring my Aibos in public or run demonstrations or volunteer programs with them, I constantly get asked why I would have a robot dog when I could have a real dog (I do have real dogs, three poodles in fact), but I never have this problem with Pleos. Actually, I've even had a couple funny instances where people assumed Pleo was a fake baby-type robot for pregnancy prevention programs, but it's never been compared to a dog or cat even though it is much more of a robotic pet than Aibo.
Feel free to input opinions, these are just some musings I had.
