Bond Gifts has hired a handwriting robot to create custom cards via an app.
by Casey Johnston
by Casey Johnston
The Bond Gifts writing robot.
A robot that can mimic human handwriting has been put to work creating notes you can send from your iPhone. The cards are generated by Bond, an iOS app from a new luxury gift-giving company of the same name, and are mostly meant for corporate relations purposes. But for us, the main attraction is that Bond employs a handwriting robot.
Imitating human cursive is not as simple as printing a font. Back-of-the-envelope math suggests there’s a few hundred thousand ways that a four-letter word’s letters can connect to each other with ligatures—or not, as the case may be. The fluidity of movement required to apply human-like amounts of pressure at the right points and not create inkblots is still a relatively recent area of research in robotics.
How letters connect varies between fonts and is particularly complex, and complex to imitate, for real handwriting.
A handwriting bot still occupies about the same usefulness territory as the current generation of 3D-printers; that is, the process is sufficiently finicky and cumbersome that the average person may have an easier time just writing out a note themselves. But for those too rushed to calligraph individual cards (and affluent enough to pay someone else to do it), the Bond handwriting bot is waiting.
For $5, the company will have the robot write up to a 255-character message on a gold-embossed card that will be sealed with wax and mailed to the intended recipient. It could serve as a slightly more expensive and less flexible replacement for iOS’ Cards app, which used to send a custom-printed card for $3 domestically but was discontinued last month.
Bond is currently iOS-only, but the company has plans to release an Android app and a Web interface as well.
0 comments:
Post a Comment