Kids love stuffed animals. Some adults too. In fact, many kids and older geeks have beds full of stuffed animals. It used to be that the closest you could come to owning a robotic animal was to buy one of those stuffed toys that would walk a few steps, bark, then power down. They weren’t cute, they weren’t lovable and you put them aside for good after like fifteen minutes.

The new WowWee Alive series will have kids hugging and sleeping and petting them for a good long time. I had a chance recently to get some hands on time with WowWee’s Panda Cub so I knew I would need a kid to see exactly how cool it was. So I employed said kid and shoved it into his little arms. I wasn’t sure if it would get better treatment then a regular stuffed animal or not. Long story short, it’s a hit with the kids. As I watched them playing with it and saw their amazed eyes alight at the fact that the Panda actually responds to them, I also was won over. The kids would not give it back and again, long story short, I was beat up by children and it made me cry at one point. I called my mom but she wouldn’t help. Basically, kids love it and you will never see it again.
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The new Citroen C4 robot has been unveiled, which shows that the car is “alive with technology”, but it’s mostly alive with funkadelic Disco action in the streets of New York.

Robot animals just keep improving and they aren’t going to stop anytime soon. Soon they’ll replace stuffed animals completely. This cuddly lion is from the WowWee “Alive” line of robot animals, and was displayed at CES 2008. It’s now available for pre-order with a released date of August 21.

They are getting very good at things like facial movement and movement in general. This thing could actually fool you for mybe a second or two. It’s got a bunch of features including lifelike hair, meow and growl… Pick up your lion cub by the scruff of the neck and watch it go limp in your hand, just like a real lion cub when its pick up by its mother. Video below.
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