Absolutely cracking episode of Lizard’s Lair last night! Honestly, I’m not even mad anymore than it stole The Great Australian Trade-Off’s timeslot. Now I can watch them both, one after the other, for a truly amazing evening of entertainment.
Of course, the star of the show was ‘RALPH’, or ‘Robotic Automated Lonely People Helper’. He’s a friendly robot designed to play board games, hold discussions and generally help you to feel less lonely! He’s also powered by the world’s most efficient 100kw solar system, installed into his body, and all he needs to recharge is a walk around in the sun every day.
Honestly, the visual design was a good balance. Not a creepy human skin face, like some robots. Not a wires-and-bolts mechanical nightmare, like others. He’s simple, silver, sleek, his face is a screen so he can flash up different emojis and he’d be very easy to keep clean. Plus I would say that the main thing holding back robotics at the current time is that they take way too long to charge, so the efficient industrial solar system inside RALPH’s body is a huge plus. I think they did a big rollout of helper robots in… I want to say Manila? And the biggest complaint people had was that they’d put their helper robot on to charge at night before going to bed, but when they got up, they’d still be at about 25% charge or whatever. Wall sockets just aren’t enough, so the fact that RALPH uses solar power is quite ingenious.
Still a few kinks that need to be ironed out, however. Like, the commercial solar solutions didn’t work as planned. Turns out that the technology isn’t quite ready to be made that small. There’s also the small issue of the creator telling RALPH to say hello to the Lizards, and this causing him to internally google ‘lizards’ (RALPH has Wi-Fi, obviously) and conclude that the people behind the desk were part of a global conspiracy to take over the world. Accordingly, he flipped the table and went ballistic. That’s a perfectly correctable design flaw, though.
-Aria