The DoorBot is a cool way to stay secure in your own home; by bringing a live streaming view of your front doorstep to your mobile device, it lets you see exactly who is ringing your doorbell. The wireless system was developed by Edison Junior, a four-person design lab dedicated to solving everyday problems. With a wi-fi enabled doorbell unit and a free app, the company has made it possible to answer the door remotely from anywhere in the world.

A doorbell unit with an integrated camera is the DoorBot’s claim to fame, and the way it revolutionizes the very simple act of answering a door. When a visitor pushes the button, the resident receives a notification on a synced mobile phone or tablet. The user can talk to the visitor via the mobile device’s microphone, which would be infinitely helpful when telling delivery people to leave a package on the stoop or informing friends to join the party in the back yard.

An optional door lock also lets homeowners lock or unlock the door from anywhere in the world. The Lockitron is another product in the early stages of production that can be ordered – and easily integrated – with the DoorBot’s interface. With the two products working together, users can see who is at the door and decide whether or let them in…all without even being in the house. DoorBot is raising funds for its production run on a new crowdfunding site called Christie Street. $169 gets you the DoorBot while $319 is enough for both the DoorBot and the Lockitron.

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Gardeners who are tired of rascally rabbits and raccoons getting into their veggies can rest easy now that Steve Norris has invented the PatrolBot Mark II. The all-metal telepresence robot is designed to be a lean, mean, varmint scaring machine. Armed with a super-bright flashlight, 100-db car horn and working water gun, the hefty robot is more than adequate for keeping your garden safe.

Being a telepresence robot, the PatrolBot Mark II is controlled from the comfort of its creator’s living room. The robot beams a live video feed of everything it sees back to Norris so he can keep up on all of the news from the yard. If he sees an unwelcome visitor, he can beep the horn, shine the light or (our favorite) spray the water gun to scare it/him/her away.

Although it was meant to be rugged and long-lasting, the PatrolBot Mark II wasn’t meant to be a serious home defense device. Still, it looks like the best way ever to keep an eye on the vindictive neighborhood paperboy or find out exactly whose dog has been leaving land mines in your front yard.

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Who wouldn’t want the ability to be in two places at once? With the increasing number of people telecommuting and businesses that are going global, being able to communicate with the rest of your team while you’re cozily ensconced in your own home is a must. The Double is kind of like a Segway for your iPad, letting you control a remote presence from anywhere else in the world.

Using a second iPad or another iDevice, you drive the Double with a simple, intuitive interface. The iPad attached to the Double can always stay at the level of the people or environment with which you’re interacting thanks to the motorized height controls. And when you want to stop rolling around and be still for a few moments, the dual kickstands engage to hold the Double stationary.

While the Double system is ideal for a teleconferencing setting, it can be used in a ton of other capacities as well. Its very existence is due to its inventors being frustrated with an overseas manufacturing process in which they could not easily tour the facilities and keep an eye on their project. Touring remote locations – manufacturing plants, museums, college campuses, galleries – would be remarkably simple (if not quite as good as being there in person) with the Double.

Families separated by large distances could benefit from the technology, as well. Those who can’t afford a plane ticket or are unable to travel could tap in to the family’s Double to attend family reunions. Of course, when you consider the $2500 price tag – not including the price of the iPad and whatever other device you’ll use to control the Double – it becomes clear that this isn’t just a fun toy for Uncle Carl to play with when he would rather watch football at home than come to Thanksgiving with the family.

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Life seems more fun when you have a friend by your side, doesn’t it? Good friends can’t always come along on new adventures everyday, but a very cool new invention from Japan’s Yamagata University could let friends from all over the world spend quality time with you every day.

The MH-2 (the “MH” adorably stands for “miniature humanoid”) is a small telepresence robot that lets a distant person share experiences in real time with the wearer. The little robot sits on the wearer’s shoulder, attached to a heavy-looking backpack. The robot is capable of making incredibly human movements, and even appears to breathe.

A friend in a remote location wears an immersive virtual reality-type getup, complete with motion capture so that gestures can be accurately expressed through the shoulder-bot. The friend can see and hear everything that’s happening where the bot and the other person are, making the experience an incredibly realistic one.

Although the current system looks a little like an exterminator’s getup, the creators are aiming for something that looks a little more like this: a hologram perched on a shoulder. Now if they only add a bot to the other shoulder, give one a pitchfork and the other a halo, we’ll finally have a reliable decision-making tool to replace our broken Magic 8 Ball.

The post Never Alone: Telepresence Robot Perches on Shoulders first appeared on Gajitz.

Interacting with someone via Skype can be a pretty lonely activity. You can see and hear the other person, but never really feel like they are right there with you. A team of researchers at Stanford University in California wants to use synchronized motion to put some personal interaction back into video chats. Their research revolves around motorized flat-screen computer monitors that move around in concert with the speaker’s own movements.

The researchers, working at Stanford’s Center for Design Research, attached motors to a monitor and programmed it to nod, shake side-to-side (as in “no”) and jostle about to signify laughing – all mirroring a user’s movements. A robotic arm is incorporated to reach out and make an attention-grabbing noise when necessary, the result of previous research which showed that humans respond strongly to an actual arm waving rather than a video of one and an actual real-time sound rather than a recording of one.

Overall, it may seem like useless science – but this technology actually has powerful implications for remote workers in the future. People who work from home or from geographically distant offices often suffer because they are treated as though they are not part of the team. Monitors which move as though they are using human gestures would help to make those remote workers seem more physically connected – especially if they are atop whole-body telepresence robots that allow users to “move” around in physical space just as if they were really there.

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