Jeff Bezos endorsement and a viral robot hand meme

It’s not every day that the wealthiest person in the world tries your product and Tweets about it. That's what happened with HaptX in July of 2019, when I was Director of Marketing at HaptX and Jeff Bezos used our gloves to control a telerobot. 

News about Jeff Bezos’ demo hit the front page of Reddit and was on the homepage of Newsweek.com, with coverage from Bloomberg, Business Insider, VentureBeat, GeekWire, VRScout, and IEEE Spectrum. His Twitter and Instagram posts about it went viral, driving millions of impressions and a surge of interest in our startup.

Here's the story of how it happened.

Tactile Telerobot: An international R&D project

I led marketing for HaptX, a startup building haptic gloves with their primary use for virtual reality training and simulation. Robotics was an exploratory use case for us. 

HaptX was investigating a new use case for the gloves – Robotics – through a collaboration with Shadow Robot (makers of robot hands), SynTouch (makers of tactile sensors), and ANA (a Japanese airline that became an unlikely source of funding for the project). 

It was an odd R&D process. HaptX (based in San Luis Obispo, CA) would use their gloves to control Shadow Robot hands (based in London, England) while occasionally ANA would join to watch. The development would happen over Zoom, and latency would be an issue. The control of the robot hands and the transmission of touch sensation would travel faster than Zoom's video and audio feed. When we traveled to Japan in 2019, the full team was together for the first time. In between demos to JAXA (Japan's space agency) and business leaders and politicians in Japan, the engineers would use the time to develop the telerobotic system together.

Wired magazine: Announcing the world's first haptic telerobot

We announced the project  via a demo to Wired magazine in March of 2019. I traveled to Wired’s SF office with the HaptX team. We set up gloves in San Francisco, so the journalist, Matt Simon, could control a robot hand based in London.  He viewed the robot hand’s motion via computer monitor, and could feel what the robotic hand touched via the HaptX Glove. To our knowledge, it was the first haptic telerobot hand to deliver touch feedback across the Atlantic. 

This was a high-risk demo -- not in terms of safety, but in terms of robot bugginess -- and there wasn't a guarantee they would cover the story (let alone cover it positively). We only had one functional arm at the time, and the international latency was still an issue. Thankfully, things went as smoothly as we could have hoped. The only technical issues we had were with the Zoom video connection. 

You can read the full article in Wired. Here's the video they produced.  We even shared the demo with Nick Thompson, then editor-in-chief of Wired and current CEO of The Atlantic.

re:MARS - stealing the show, after almost getting kicked out

The article was a success and drove significant interest from media. Among them was Amazon, who wanted the telerobot to appear at its conference re:MARS, a conference dedicated to Machine learning Automation Robotics, and Space.

Our team had ambitious plans for the conference -- we aimed to turn our one arm system into a two arm robot. This would make the system much more impressive and practical, but it posed a significant engineering challenges. The robotic hands cost more than $100,000 each. The system must be designed in such a way that the hands don't collide into each other, but so that they can operate in very close proximity so they can dexterously interact. 

We had two short months between the article's publication and the re:MARS debut. But the engineering teams had to develop the system with the gloves in California and the robot arm and hands in England. The system wasn't finished when we arrived to the Las Vegas conference center. They needed to finish engineering as we set up our booth. 

As we approached the dress rehearsal to the show, the system was still not working. The robot hands would behave erratically and then stall. The conference producer visited our booth and saw it was a mess -- cables everywhere, cinderblocks that weighed down the robotic arms, engineers frantically disassembling and reassembling equipment. 

She told us we had 15 minutes to get things working, or they'd ask us to pack up and leave. 

The engineers worked a miracle. When she returned, she asked, "Is it working?" 

I said, "Yes." 

She said something along the lines of, "Okay. I'm going to try it. Here's my phone. Record a video. Talk me through it like I'm Jeff Bezos. If this is good, I'll show him the video." 

I gave her the pitch and recorded her demo. The thing is, some of our safety systems weren't fully calibrated yet. There was no risk to the her, but there was a chance she could slam the robot hands through the conference table in front of her, destroying hundreds of thousands of equipment and ending our conference before it started.

Thankfully, that didn't happen. The demo worked great and the video turned out well. She sent the video to Jeff, and when the conference opened the next morning, we learned that a VIP guest would be visiting our booth that afternoon. 

Mr. Bezos meets the robot

Being the shameless marketer that I am, the first thing I did was tell the press. Alan Boyle, science writer for GeekWire, was in attendance. I got a hold of Alan and told him to hang by our booth for a front row spot to the spectacle. 

Mr. Bezos approached the group and the whole convention followed behind him. My colleague, Mike, was operating the robot and gave him a firm handshake. I gave Bezos an overview of how the system works along with some safety precautions. I also had him remove his very large, very fancy watch before donning the HaptX Gloves. I introduced Bezos to my colleague, Leif, who strapped him into the gloves I got back into marketer mode and took pictures of the demo. 

Bezos played with the robot for several minutes, picking up objects and giving four thumbs up with his trademark belly laugh. Here's a video of the demo. He described the experience as, “Weirdly natural... That is really impressive. The tactile feedback is tremendous.” The quotes were picked up on video and reported by the press, so HaptX referenced them in its marketing materials for years to come.

Business Insider described how we stole the show, "“The star of the expo was a tactile touch device built by HaptX and Shadow Robot. When CEO Jeff Bezos roamed the conference floor, this is the demo he did.”

Shaq, Adam Savage, and everyone else want to try the telerobot

After Jeff Bezos demoed the robot, virtually every one else at the conference wanted to give it a try. 

One of the most memorables booth visits was my childhood hero, Shaq. Sadly, his giant hands could not fit in the HaptX Gloves, but he gave the robot a handshake. Shaq posted the video to his Instagram. (If you play this with the volume on, you can hear me blathering in the background.)

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to meet dozens of celebrities and public figures, but I’ve never been star struck the way I was when I met Shaq. He is larger than life and as funny as he is on TV. 

Adam Savage of Mythbusters dropped by for a demo as well. He was blown away by the experience, and hung around to chat with the team.

Going Hands-On with Adam Savage’s Tested

Adam Savage's demo preceded a special video for Tested, website and YouTube channel that focuses on engineering and technology. Norm Chan demoed the robot and interviewed the team for an in-depth profile.

Reflecting on adventures with telerobots

This post reflects on my adventures with telerobots in 2019. The engineering team at HaptX, Shadow Robot, SynTouch, Tangible Research, as well as the funding team from ANA deserve the credit for bringing this project to life. Because of this project, I got to travel the world, meet my childhood hero, go viral on social media, and learn about the future of robotics. 

I feel like I was lucky to be along for the ride, and to work with amazing collaborators along the way.