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Design

You Can Now Buy the Rolling Droid from 'Star Wars VII'

BB-8, the next generation's R2-D2, fits in the palm of your hand.
Images courtesy Sphero

Remember when everyone was trying to figure out how BB-8, the little soccer ball-shaped droid pining to be the R2-D2 of Star Wars: The Force Awakens works? Well, some designers here on Earth made a (tiny) app-enabled version of the lovable little ball that you can observe in your living room. You can control it with pretty standard RC input on your smartphone, tell it to do stuff with a voice-recognition mode, or let it wander around your house, bleeping and blooping like it has feelings and an allegedly developing "personality" or something. An augmented reality feature lets you send it "holographic messages" using your phone, which is a pretty cool update to the crappy walkie-talkies built into the RC robots I grew up with.

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The toy's tagline is, "This is the droid you're looking for," which is pretty clever, but it's actually been around for awhile in the form of the Sphero, an app-enabled robot ball that functions pretty similarly to BB-8 (but without the head and paintjob), and is made by the same company. This take on BB-8 is undoubtedly the beginning of Disney's mechandising onslaught for The Force Awakens, but it's a pretty solid one. We'd be lying if we said we didn't want like five of these adorable robo-balls meandering around our house on auto-pilot to watch them bump into things. Check it out in action in the video below, and see if you can seriously think up anything cooler—outside of an IRL hoverbike, that is.

Sphero will be available online at midnight for a cool $150. Learn more and place your order here.

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