BarCamp London 4 - My Presentation: "Nabaztag: The Sweary Rabbit"

4:35p.m., Sun 1 Jun 2008

I got my presentation out of the way early. I was underprepared, for which I apologise (but how much time does it take to prepare swear words? I am, after all, an expert with many years experience ;)

I presented Dunn, my nabaztag rabbit. After a lot of wrangling with the wifi network we did finally manage to coax a few "sh*t", "b*****ks" and "f**ks" out of it. Maybe I should have quit there when the going was good - thank you, and good night!

There some photos from this presentation on flickr:
Arty shot,
Dirk & Dunn,
battling with the wifi,
spouting.

(Courtesy of Phillie Casablanc & Rugby Mad Girl (thx!)

I've alternately loved and hated Dunn, I've written a few ranty emails about Nabaztag to friends and whined to the Nabaztag customer support, so the presentation was the culmination of all that. I do like Nabaztag - I like that it's an ambient way of interacting with online info, I like that I get news headlines via RSS pushed to me rather than having to consciously open my laptop or mobile phone.

The main point of the presentation was that Nabaztag has been marketed really well. It looks fan-f**king-tastic in the marketing speil and in those flash movies on nabaztag.com. And crucially, everything they claim IS possible. Just not yet. I imagine that the rabbit has sold well in excess of expectations and the technical team at Nabaztag are struggling with the volume of traffic.

So here we go, here's a loose representation (or should that be re-presentation?) of what I had to say:

What is Nabaztag and what does he do?

Here's the aforementioned flash presentation:
http://www.nabaztag.com/en/m-3-nabaztag-what-does-he-do.html

But, to surmise:
- He dances.
- He talks.
- He listens and obeys.
- He has a personality.
- He has a sense of smell.v - He'll play with friends.
- He does as he's told.

I'll tackle these one-by-one:

He Dances.

Well kinda.
He's got five LED lights and two simple motors that make his ears move.

You can, through the API, make a dance routine for the rabbit to enact.
But it's time-consuming and under-whelming when you do.
Why bother?

What do the lights mean?
The flashing purple nose appears to mean "attempting an HTTP request"
A flashing blue nose means "I have messages" a click of the head will retrieve the messages.
Beyond that... I forget.

There are some network status messages, and some weather language:
http://help.nabaztag.com/fiche.php?langue=3&fiche=22

He talks.

He can read emails.

Email dunn@nabaztag.com* and he'll read the subject line of an email. Weirdly, he won't read the body of the message.

* if you're emailing from a registered email address.

He can read RSS

Yep, subscribe to an RSS feed and the rabbit will read out new headlines as and when they are published -or you can instruct the system to only read an RSS feed at a prescribed time.

There's certain peculiarities as to what Nabaztag requires. For instance, an RSS feed without a valid value for the language element will be ignored. Still valid RSS! but no good in Nabaz world.

He can subscribe to Podcasts.

You can manually subscribe with an RSS feed URL, and there's a shed-load in the site with single-click subscription.
As with the RSS reder, you can configure it to play new episodes as and when they become available - or to play a new episode at a prescribed time.

He'll play mp3 format - both static files and live streams. There does seem to be a limit to the mp3 support though - it's basic support and some mp3 stream just won't work.

Since Nabztag can play MP3 files you're also able to upload an MP3 file and then 'attach' it to a message. You can't send an mp3 file as an email attachement though - that's a step too far.

He will play MIDI files, but only the ones on offer from the site. You can't upload midi files.

He won't play m4a/wma/ogg vorbis/real/quicktime or any other format other than mp3.

He listens and obeys.

Yep - voice commands - you press the button on his head, wait for the bleep, let go of the button and voice your command, here's the few I've found:

"Weather"
"Radio" (which will play a random radio station)
"Radio OneWord" (which plays the station called "OneWord" if you have it enabled in your profile.)

Presuambly there are others, but not many... I remain underwhelmed. Especially since OneWord is no longer broadcasting anything other than birdsong.

He has personality.

Hmmmm.
The 'personality' is just another podcast dressed up as something different.
The mp3 files that are played are randomly selected from a library of wacky clips like knock-knock jokes.

He can smell.

Yeah. Out of his tummy button. The freak!

The marketing would have you believe that the rabbit will sense when your partner arrives home and send you an email telling you this.

In reality, he has an RFID detector in his stomach.

Which doesn't seem to do much. The RFID tags (called "Ztamps") are still unavailable to buy.

You can buy a series of french children's books which have the tags in the cover - when introduced to the rabbit he'll detect the RFID tag and read the book aloud.

No other RFID services have been announced or appear to be available :(

He'll play with friends

Two rabbits in the same room can synchronise.
Two rabbits can sychronise over t'internet - the marketing blurb had two young lovers using their rabbits to develop their own secret language.

Being a cyncial, non-romantic thirty-something that leaves me underwhelmed...

...until you get fecking hundreds of them! Here;s a youtube clip of the German opera I mentioned...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxqGkLQyDiM

He does as he is told...

There's a REST-ful API. Here:
http://api.nabaztag.com/

And here's the basic HTML I wrote to prod and poke the API.

http://www.gareth53.co.uk/nabaztag/

Niels Bruin's AIR app does all this stuff too:
http://www.nielsbruin.nl/blog/?p=143

Now, onto the BAD BITS

Just a quick moan about the website which is one of those sites that's over-AJAXed - too much content is loaded into the existing rendered document. It renders the browser's back button pretty much useless.

The Nabaztag server can be pretty unresponsive. What's typical is that the rabbit will go quiet for a few hours and then suddenly have an attack of the verbal diahorrea.

All traffic has to go via nabaztag.com, you HAVE to use their software - it's not ike you can install a package on your own network or your own server.

And now some GOOD BITS

He IS cute. He can be used to swear in an amusing manner. These things don't get boring - although that's probably a reflection on my personality rather than an impartial evaluation of nabaztag itself.

The two most useful applications of my Nabaztag is the weather update (which is offered as a Nabaztag basic functionality) and the tube updates in a morning. I have an RSS feed that I've instructed Nabaztag to check every morning at 7.05am.

I'm picking the RSS feed here:

http://conor.net/feeds/rss/tube.xml

(Thanks Conor. Anybody else annoyed that TfL don't officially offer this info in RSS feed?)

And then filtering everything out except the Picadilly Line status using Yahoo Tubes:

The Yahoo Pipe is set up using a single command - a filter which "permits items that attach any of the following.... Rules: item.title Contains 'Piccadilly'."

What might be more helpful is if I had permit items that satisfy item.title DONESN'T CONTAIN 'good service' - that would just notify you of those lines with a problem. But I was being selfish.

So there you go. I have no conclusion. I hope you liked the swearing.