The Force is strong with the small Boulder robot toymaker picked by Disney to build a toy based on a character sure to be next R2-D2.
Call the force Bob — as in Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger, who accelerated Sphero’s year-long quest to turn the new BB-8 droid into the most talked about toy spun out of the coming-soon “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.” The toys officially launch Friday.
“It was an incredible happy coincidence and lucky timing,” said Paul Berberian, Sphero’s CEO. “We had great support from Disney and Lucasfilm during the time to turn that character into something for people to bring home.”
Sphero’s $149 BB-8 toy interacts with a mobile app and explores on its own, much like Sphero’s original robot ball. It also may have influenced filmmakers to create a life-size droid last spring.
While Sphero wasn’t privy to BB-8’s backstory, the new robot toy aims to be as true as possible to the droid’s character — even if those traits aren’t revealed until December when “The Force Awakens” opens. BB-8 is a connected toy so developers can push out software updates over the Internet any time they write a new one.
“We put a barely functioning firmware in and the first thing that happens (when a customer buys it), its entire brains get changed. And that’s the beauty of what we’re doing,” Berberian said. “Our toys should be getting better every day. That’s the future of play.”
Sphero’s magical moment came in July 2014, when it joined the three-month Disney Accelerator to get access to senior executives at the studio.
Iger came prepared at their first meeting.
“He says, ‘Hey, I want to show you something.’ And he pulls out his iPhone and he starts showing us pictures of the actual filming — the still photos from the set of Star Wars,” Berberian recalled of that auspicious day. “And he points to this character, BB-8. ‘You see this? That’s the next droid. The next R2-D2. Can you bring this to life?’ “
Four hours later, Berberian and co-founders Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson had hacked their original robotic ball, printed a top out with the 3-D printer they’d brought to Los Angeles and soldered together a BB-8 prototype.
Getting BB-8 rolling
Sphero, which went through Boulder’s Techstars program as Orbotix in 2010, honed in on the perfect robot: a ball. Balls don’t get stuck.
Before joining the Disney program, it had $20 million in sales and had raised $35 million in funding.
And developers were already working on an accessory for Sphero.
When Iger asked, the team thought of the hat they built for Sphero’s head.
“It was funny and you’d laugh,” Berberian said. “But he looked like the character from Monopoly with the top hat.”
BB-8’s head has no electronics. It’s essentially a magnet that can detach — and sometimes falls off when BB-8 rolls off a table or gets bumped too hard.
Still, a crazy amount of engineering went into the design to make sure it stayed attached. As BB-8 rolls around, the head scoots upward as the mechanics and software inside the body are constantly trying to balance it. The hardest part was building the ball and software.
“It’s a completely different physics model (from Sphero),” Berberian said. “We had to redo a lot of the firmware. If you remove the head from the BB-8, the ball doesn’t drive the same way as Sphero.”
Sphero signed the BB-8 toy contract with Disney in November, and that’s when they finally got the design specs and high-resolution images to begin work. In the months before, the team worked on technology it hoped to include in BB-8 or other future products: inductive wireless charging, Bluetooth and the mobile app.
Even the paint and exterior design was a challenge, requiring more than 100 steps to decorate and make sure the artwork doesn’t rub off.
Sphero released two other robots and doubled its staff during development. It currently employs more than 70 people. In June, the company raised $45 million in funding in a round that included Walt Disney Co. It’s been a hectic year.
“It nearly broke the company,” Berberian said Tuesday. “The software team is sweating bullets right now because they are still writing code and the product launches in three days. We are writing code down to the minute.”
At the Star Wars Celebration convention in April, a stunned crowd listening to “The Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams, watched as a life-size BB-8 droid rolled itself onto the stage.
Even the Sphero team was surprised.
This was not the same BB-8 used in the movie — that was a series of props operated by remote control or puppeteers, according to a StarWars.com interview with Neil Scanlon, head of the movie’s creature shop.
The life-size BB-8 didn’t exist during filming because Scanlon didn’t feel existing technology was advanced enough.
So, was it inspired by Sphero’s BB-8 prototype?
Berberian can only speculate.
“I think when they saw that we could make the physical toy move like the character in the movie, I think it inspired the prop masters to make a physical version of that,” he said. “We weren’t involved in that, but we proved it could be done.”
Sphero’s BB-8 story
Out of the box, Sphero’s BB-8 can be controlled via the mobile app. BB-8 also can roam autonomously, building a map of the room and reporting back messages like, “Life form detected” or if it just had a collision. It reacts to certain phrases, like “It’s a trap” or “Watch out,” which triggers its alert system.
Sphero also built in holographic messages that can be sent to the droid and viewed on the mobile app. Users can also record their own video, which adds an animated projection of the user speaking to BB-8, just like R2-D2 projecting the image of Princess Leia saying ” Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi,” in the original movie.
Sphero’s team still doesn’t know what the real BB-8 is like. Or its story line. Disney wouldn’t share that with anyone, Berberian said — “part of mystery of Star Wars.”
“People think we got briefed to the whole story but we know nothing,” he said. “I know he’s a droid. I know he probably helps people and maybe there’s an X-wing fighter involved, but you know as much as I do.”
And that’s the beauty of Sphero. The original robot, now two years old, has received more than 30 software releases and 24 firmware updates.
When the Star Wars movie comes out in December, the team will celebrate by renting a Boulder theater for the first showing. But then they’ll go back to work and write more character features to send out to BB-8’s all over the world.
“We don’t get to write the story for BB-8. We get to bring it to life,” he said. “…If you take a BB-8 you buy on Sept. 4, and you look at it Sept. 4, 2016, it’s going to be a totally different product. And you’ll only buy it once.”
Tamara Chuang: 303-954-1209, tchuang@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Gadgetress
