A cardboard 'bot from Cambridge makes it big at the Tribeca Film Festival

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Reben was in town for the Tribeca Film Festival; he had deployed 20 BlabDroids there as robotic documentarians, asking questions of random people and recording their answers. (BlabDroid also won the Creative Sparks competition at DIY Days, earning Reben some free office space in New York and a "micro-grant" of $500. I served as a judge.)

The 'bot is designed to look cute and homemade, and it speaks in the voice of a 7-year old boy — all strategies to induce interviewees to let down their guard and start talking freely. Among the questions BlabDroid is prone to ask is, "What's the worst thing you've ever done to someone?"

BlabDroid garned quite a lot of publicity while in New York for Tribeca (here's the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Gizmag). But Reben's Kickstarter campaign to raise $75,000 in order to put the 'bot into production hasn't yet caught fire. For $299, you get a fully-assembled BlabDroid that can move around under its own steam, and connect via Bluetooth with a smartphone; a less-expensive "Starter BlabDroid" is also available. With about a month left, Reben is still $70,000 short of his target.

Reben heads to the UK later this month to speak at the Thinking Digital conference. BlabDroid's predecessor was a Media Lab project called Boxie, The Story Gathering Robot. Below is a video that BlabDroid shot at a film festival in Amsterdam back in March, and a photo of BlabDroid's Arduino-based innards.