Bandai bot lets Junior be Big Brother

Kids these days! Always playing fast and loose on the increasingly hazy border between toys and robots. If they're not building their own humanoids or cuddling with prefab pets, they'll be playing Big Brother with Bandai's latest home robot kit, NetTansor. Available in December for around $420, it's a mobile droid that gives users of all ages remote surveillance and telepresence capabilities through the Internet.

The diminutive NetTansor is basically a remote-controlled, programmable webcam with wheels, a microphone and a wireless LAN. It can also play back preset sound files, so little Taro can have fun surprising people at home through it while he's at school. The rover has image-recognition abilities too and will send photos and alert emails to a user's cellphone when it detects motion while in watchdog mode. It can also be used to relay voice messages or monitor pets remotely. You can easily program it to remind the kids to brush their teeth at night or have it carry out other simple tasks based on its AI abilities.

I think it'll be really neat when these things start rolling down the streets, riding trains and generally cropping up everywhere, like omniscient disembodied eyes. People could be in multiple places at once, interacting through them as a distributed entity. Say hello to the urban panopticon.