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Sphero, the company best known for its Star Wars BB-8 tech toy, has revealed how it’s helping to teach kids about programming and why it believes there should be robot in every home.
Speaking to PCR sister publication Toy News, Sphero CEO Paul Berberian said: “Our big vision is to put an entertainment robot in every home.
“It means advancing the technology and introducing it to the marketplace at a measured pace so that everyone starts becoming comfortable with having robots in the house.”
He continued: “You may have a vacuum cleaner in your house that’s a robot but you won’t have a relationship with your vacuum cleaner.
“We want to put characters in your house and we want those characters to uniquely understand the different members of your family and adjust its behaviour based on your interests.”
The smart home is a hot topic in the tech retail industry right now, and John Lewis has just unveiled the UK’s largest smart home experience at its flagship London store.
The BB-8 toy sold so well in the lead up to Christmas 2015 that Widget revealed it was the distie’s star product for the holiday period.
Speaking about the future of tech toys, Berberian said that Sphero isn’t interested in designing its own chips, but rather working on sticking together the latest tech to ‘build an experience that the world hasn’t seen before’.
“Our products could not have been built five years ago,” he said. “Some of them couldn’t have been built two years ago, because the level of technology wasn’t there yet to support that type of product. The experience you’re getting now with BB-8, you couldn’t have built it in 2002.”
Berberian also touched on how Sphero’s gadgets are being used in the classroom to help teach STEM subjects.
“Half a million kids have already used the Sphero ball in the classroom,” he revealed. “Thousands of schools around the world are using them.
“Education is a critical component of our business. We’ve built an incredible software app that makes it easy to programme but exposes all the depth of things you can do there.
“To bring this type of technology into classrooms you need fantastic software and we’ve invested millions of dollars into our software development, which elevates the experience.”
Read Toy News’ full interview with Sphero CEO Paul Berberian here.
