My Keepon

What do you do when you want to study social interaction? That’s right, you build a $30,000 squishy yellow robot. And that’s precisely what Hideki Kozima did when he created Keepon. But in doing so he also created a phenomenon because videos of his wacky research robot dancing to various songs became huge online hits. Enter, with a zeitgeist-riding price tag of just £39.99, My Keepon.

A kind of Keepon lite, this impossibly cute robot dances and bops in time to the music (or anything else) it hears via a built-in mic. It’s a bit like a high tech version of those old school dancing flowers but infinitely more amusing. With its uncanny sense of timing (well, beat detection tech) My Keepon’s ever-changing movements are astoundingly fluid; imagine gawping at a rubbery mutant tennis ball with Beyoncé inside and you’re halfway there.

But there’s more to this battery-operated boogie-er than funky moves. An array of sensors under My Keepon’s skin cause it to react in various ways to taps, tickles, squeezes and pokes. It will even change mood in response to your touch, with emotions swinging between curious, excited, sleepy and ready to attack the next idiot who plays anything by Justin Bieber. All right, we made that last bit up but everything else is true.

Twin buttons on My Keepon’s ‘stage’ allow you to switch between modes, but in all honesty you’ll be too mesmerised to move your hands, unless it’s to catch your jaw as it drops to the floor in gobsmacked awe. Hey, that rhymed. We digress. The point is this little yellow critter really is amazing. In fact we feel a craze a-coming, so get ordering before our limited stock shimmies out of the stockroom. Now where’s that David Hasselhoff playlist…