I can’t believe I haven’t heard of the Pleo before. It’s Alive! — or it seems alive, because it moves like it’s alive:
What gives Pleo its emotional hooks and makes it seem so much like a sentient pet is how it moves. Chung has managed to faithfully capture graceful, animal-like locomotion. There is none of the jerky machinelike quality that mars most bots. “Nobody has ever done that,” Chung says. “They’ve spent $2 million and a year trying to get their robot dog to walk, and it’s still like this,” he adds, suddenly twisting his body into a scarily accurate imitation of a stiff-limbed automaton.“It’s like, ‘Look at me! I’m a robot! I’ve got gears and motors inside me! Zzzzt! Zzzzzt!‘” Then, for good measure, Chung breaks into a disco “robot” dance, and the programmers clustered around Pleo start chuckling. That’s when I realize I’m looking at Ugobe’s secret weapon: Chung’s uncanny physicality.
Because how do you create the first robot that seems like it’s truly alive? By starting with an inventor who knows how to move.
Chung began his career as a mime. In his early twenties, teaming up with comedian Gary Schwartz, he performed everywhere from cruise ships to The Alan Thicke Show. A short, tightly muscled guy, Chung was famous for pulling off Cirque du Soleil-type feats. In one act, he pretended to be an astronaut lifting off into orbit: While seated on a chair, he slowly raised himself up by his hands, inverted his body, and rose into a handstand.
“He looked like he was floating in space,” Schwartz says. “He blew people’s minds.” Enamored of special effects and handy with tools, Chung made a sword out of spare sofa parts and duct tape – then used it as a calling card to break into stunt work. Being short and trained as a mime got him inside high tech movie costumes, including an orangutan suit for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. To the studios, he was a double threat: He could perform like a monkey and then fix the robots when they broke.
“What I learned from all the mime work and the suit work is that motion creates emotion,” Chung says. “How you stand, how you move, is a big communicator. We take it for granted, but it’s crucial to what makes us seem ‘normal’ to each other, right?”
OK, so he was a mime. How did he end up making toys?
In the mid ’80s, he left Hollywood to work in the R&D division of Mattel – “toy college for me,” he says. It was not a felicitous match. Mattel wanted him to crank out action figures from popular movies; Chung wanted to produce art. He posted a sign over his cubicle that proclaimed these things are not toys and began dreaming of making a robot so realistic that people would treat it like a household pet. His earliest sketches were of dinosaurs.“They have this long neck and tail; they’re very expressive,” he explains. “Plus, all the people that don’t even like toys are going to say, ‘Cool dinosaur.’” He made a rickety prototype by repurposing a toy originally designed as a He-Man accessory. Mattel executives were intrigued – but recoiled when they discovered it would need eight motors; those cost $1 apiece, and a $30 toy couldn’t include more than one or two. He told them they should build it and charge more. They told him he was crazy and killed the project.
Disillusioned, Chung later left Mattel and went freelance, devising and selling inventions, like an “action man” and an automatic hair-curler. But he still hankered to develop a virtual pet, and in 1997 he brainstormed an idea with David Hampton, a programmer friend. They called it Furball: a tiny, tribblelike thing that would have eyes, ears, and a mouth – just enough to create the illusion of sentience (“the simplest haiku of a life-form you could get,” as Chung puts it). To keep it from being too expensive, Chung worked out a cunning set of gears that would drive the entire toy using a single motor. Tiger Electronics loved the concept and commissioned it.
Everyone knows how the story ended: Furby came out in 1998, and holiday consumers went berserk, buying $1.2 billion worth of the $30 toy. Chung made more than $10 million in royalties. He now had the freedom and money to do precisely what he wanted.
And that dinosaur was still on the list.