I’m curious if they ever served any real positive function? or if they were more of a curiosity.
Employees can be video conferenced into meetings, and work remotely. You’d think there would have to be a huge benefit in order to pay your employees to waste part of their productive day remote controlling a little vehicle around your office like an idiot, when they could be virtually going instantly from meeting to meeting and task to task without all that wasted time.
The only benefit i’ve ever been given is it provides a meat space interface for people that have a difficult time adjusting to remote virtual workers. even this meat space interface is better served through Augmented Reality avatars like hololens or google glass can provide. virtual avatars also only interact with the people that need to interact with them, they don’t jam up the hallways needlessly, need costly physical parts and repairs, and aren’t stymied by stairs.
These telepresence RCs are such a weird confusing class of device, as if they were thought up by people who knew of modern tech but were planted squarely in the past and can’t wrap their minds around new ways of using and applying said tech. in my mind it would be similar to industrial revolution people thinking we’d all have robotic mechanical horses pulling carriages, because that is the paradigm they knew. those don’t make any sense compared to modern cars though and would just be impractical curiosities. (robotic horses would actually be cool unlike these really dorky stick screen scooter things, lol.)
