Geek Gift Guide: My Robot Nation

Throw a rock these days and you’ll hit a website that’s offering a “Geek Christmas Gift Guide”.  Usually, these are little more than a list of links to Amazon with uninspired ideas like Captain America on Blu-ray, a Batman graphic novel, and something having to do with Boba Fett.  Yawners.  So with that in mind, up until Christmas, we here at Top Hat Sasquatch are going to present a few focused posts highlighting a cool and unique item that would be a good gift for the geek in your life.  To kick things off, we’ll start with a subject that is near and dear to every nerd’s heart – robots.  More specifically, custom-made robots from My Robot Nation.

You’ve probably seen 3D printing in the news.  There have been a few high-profile stories of anthropologists using the technology to recreate fossils, and even some labs that are “printing” new human organs out of stem cells.  But the industry that is seeing the most impact from 3D printing is manufacturing.  Companies now have the ability to create a one-off copy of an object, most often for prototyping purposes, using a variety of light-weight materials, at less expense than using traditional manufacturing methods.

However, in order to use 3D printing to its fullest, you need to be quite the wizard with AutoCAD.  Until now, of course.  As Sarah Stocker, one of the co-founders of Kodama Studios, the company behind My Robot Nation, puts it, “We looked at the convergence of two really compelling trends in future-facing technology: browser-based interactions and 3D printing.”  To that end, they developed an intuitive and fun online interface that lets you to create a robot with ready-made parts, taking the need for CAD skills out of the equation.  You choose the head, torso, arms, and legs, add extra parts ranging from antennas to gears to radar screens and ray guns.  For Christmas, they’re offering special holiday-themed parts, like snowflakes, holly, or even a snowman head.  Then give your robot a custom paint job, including special physical effects, like rust spots or bullet holes for that lived-in look.  When you’re finished, you can order a physical copy that will be 3D printed and shipped to your door in about five days.

My Robot Nation's Online Robot Editor

Before you sit your littlest geek down at the computer to design their own robot, though, be aware that these are not action figures.  In order to keep prices remotely affordable, these robots are not articulated.  The final step in the design process is setting your robot’s pose, which it will be stuck in forever.  Furthermore, the figures are somewhat fragile.  The robots are created using a recyclable plaster powder that is held together with a chemical bonding agent, and should be treated with the same care you would a ceramic collectible.  So while they won’t be battling it out with your kid’s G.I. Joe figures, a robot would look really cool sitting on a shelf at home or on a grown-up geek’s desk at work.

Posing Your Robot

The robots come in a variety of sizes, starting at 2” and going up to 6”.  Prices range from $17.99 for a little guy to $169.99 for the jumbo-sized, which means for the price of a generic Blu-ray disc, you could give the geek in your life their very own custom-made robot.  And robots beat out Blu-ray any day.  Best of all, you can send them a gift certificate code, so they can design the robot themselves.

According to Stocker, robots are just the beginning for Kodama Studios.  While they’re keeping their upcoming projects under lock and key, if My Robot Nation is any indication of the coolness they have up their sleeves, we’ll have to keep an eye on them for more exciting, geeky gift ideas in the future.  In the meantime, check out My Robot Nation to get your custom robot today!

For more information on the whole process, check out this great video from one of the My Robot Nation beta testers: