"It could have been worse," one owner incredibly concluded.
  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Am I the only one confused by why a vacume needs a live video feed? Who’s sitting there thinking “I want to watch what my vacume sees!”

    • PSoul•Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Ok so I used to work for iRobot, the OG robot vacuum maker. Robot vacuums used to vacuum randomly. To make them vacuum systematically, they need to map your house. One cheap way to do that is to use a camera roughly pointing at your ceiling and do Video SLAM. The camera identifies features on your ceiling and how they are changing to know where the robot is and map the room.

      I guess ecovac thought they could add a camera feed feature for free since they already had a camera on the robot.

    • GenosseFlosse@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Probably to map the room and avoid obstacles like Chairs and pets. Low res cameras are probably the cheapest option for hardware.

    • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.mlEnglish
      01·
      1 month ago

      The unfortunate, actual reason is that people will pay more markup on the vacuum with useless shit added than it costs to add it. Explaining why humans are like this is unfortunately a less tidy and much more disappointing endeavour.

  • Frostbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    How could it have been worse. A fucking basic appliance was hijacked. Ofc its not weaponized, that would have made it worse I guess

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    imagine now somehow combining its sensor data with outputs from a LLM everyone would think that their roomba has become sentient