Of course there's an adorable robot who hangs out at the Pixar Animation Studios.
Nobody could possibly be surprised by the story of Mira, a spherical droid designed by Pixar technical director Alonso Martinez in collaboration with Aaron Nathan and Vijay Sundaram. Martinez intended for her to be a desktop companion, but she's now here to entertain the world with her cute games of peek-a-boo with her creator. Watch a recent demonstration:
Obviously a robot involved with Pixar is going to make us think of the studio's beloved movie WALL-E. Mira provides a link, then, between that movie and this year's Pixar release, Inside Out. Right now she responds playfully, through face-tracking technology, as being either sad or joyful, depending on the attention she's receiving. And she's apparently going to evolve to further understand human emotions to interact in other ways. Here's an earlier demo of what she was like a few months earlier:
Pixar ought to embrace Mira as a new mascot or something. They should make a movie about her, even if it truly is just a mash-up of WALL-E and Inside Out. Wouldn't you see a movie that's like a spin-off of both, where we see the development of an AI through the personifications of what's going on inside its mind? The birth of a robot's own emotions, one by one. Martinez and his partners on the project need to get Mira more mobile, though.
She could get a larger spherical body a la BB-8 from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Pixar and Lucasfilm are housemates now under the Disney umbrella and should be able to work together on this idea.
