Jeppe – is this the new face of home video chat?

HELSINKi, Finland – This morning I came across an unusual new character in the Nokia corridors – a wheeled home video conferencing robot called Jeppe. It’s the latest creation to emerge from the Nokia Research Centre Smart Spaces lab, a place where the teams focus on researching innovative solutions to how devices and services talk to each other, and applications such as remotely managing our homes or tracking our general well-being using “smart environments”. In this instance, the Jeppe prototype is a new experiment that explores how we might accept a different breed of video communication in our homes that’s more compelling and breaks the mould of the traditional PC/webcam scenario.