Unboxing the Sphero

Hey Dave Johnson editor of eHow Tech here and if you’re thinking about a gift for Dad or even a gift for Mom you know sometimes you just wanna give them a ball. Well how about a high tech ball, a robotic ball, that’s Sphero. This is probably one of the most unusual gadgets that you are going to run into and it’s actually you can buy it online or right in Apple stores because it’s really designed to work with the iPhone and the iPad. So let’s take a look at this and see what’s inside the box and then actually have some fun playing with it as well. There is sphero, there’s the ball, it’s kind of weighted so it’s like a Weeble, if you remember those things, take this off this is the charging stand for the sphero, this is the user guide and actually this is kind of cool, there’s a little get-started guide here and in addition to that they give you a bunch of little cards that are suggestions for how you can use sphero because this is a fairly open-ended toy, you can do all kinds of things with it. Tying a string and dog toy to it so it becomes a pet toy or set up an obstacle course and roll the ball around. We have the charging cable so plug that in there it will come to life, light up and start charging. Let’s let this guy charge for a few minutes and then sync it with our iPhone or iPad and have some fun rolling it around on the floor. Alright so it’s time to play with the sphero, I have been looking forward to this. Now um you just set it down on the floor it automatically connects to your iPad or your iPhone. I’ve downloaded half a dozen sphero apps, there are a lot more in the store, most of them are free some of them cost 99 cents. So they all do different things and have different games. So I’m just going to fire up the standard sphero app so I can use the controller on the ipad to make it roll anywhere I want, and uh this is great for chasing the cat or the dog around the house that sort of thing, but it does a lot of really cool things for example there are different programmed maneuvers it will do like a circle or a square, that sort of thing. I can choose a square and tell it to go. Let’s try something a little more fun, for example we can fire up Sharky. Sharky is what’s called an augmented reality application or game. So um as long as I point my iPad at the Sphero it will project this animated cartoon character where the ball is. Okay so meet Sharky, Sharky is a sphero app he is a cartoon character, as long as I point my iPad at him at the sphero we see Sharky instead of the sphero ball so we can roll him around and it’s a bit of a game because there are coins and bugs floating around in the virtual world and if I collect them I get points.