Last week, The Hollywood News ventured into central London for an afternoon of excitement that involved coding robots for the home entertainment release of Passengers. The film, which is now available on all formats, including DVD and Blu-ray, sees Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt star as two space travellers who wake up ninety years early aboard the colonial vessel Avalon, a spasheship bound for a new habitat named Homeland II.
The movie also stars Michael Sheen as a character named Arthur. Arthur isn’t human. Arthur a robot barman and a key character in the film, which kind of explains why we’re sat in front on a desk with some interesting looking equipment in front of us. We’re here with RobotFun.co.uk, a company that offers workshops like the one we are about to undertake. The workshops are primarily put on for children – in particular primary schools up and down the country. The company employs the use of many robots, but today we’re looking at the Ozobot, a very small device a touch bigger than a fifty pence piece that you can actually go out an buy in the shops.
The Ozobot responds to different coloured lines, each of which will make the robot obey different commands. Essentially, this is computer programming at its most basic form, and we kick things off by drawing lines on a blank piece of paper, mixing up solid black lines with multi-coloured dots – which make the robot turn in a specific direction, spin around, speed-up, slow down etc. The sensitive nature of the robots make this a relatively pain-free experience and before long we have the device moving around the paper with relative ease.
The great thing about these robots however, is that they are also compatible with iPads – so, with the use of the official Ozobot app, you’re able to digitally draw lines and put in command colours on-screen. Once tethered to the device, calibrated and initialised, the Ozobot will replicate your commands from the lines on top of the screen. Again, relatively straight-forward and tons of fun.
So, while this is all good fun, aside from being a very mini-robot, what does this have to do with the film? Well, we’d be spoiling things by going into too much detail, but Sheen’s character Arthur is pivotal to the plot and does not have the ability to respond to Jim Preston (Pratt) and Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) waking up nine-decades early. Jim and Aurora too don’t have the ability to program him either, so, what we’re essentially doing here is the hypothetical ‘what if’… which leads us onto our final challenge for the day.
Our task is simple. At a key point in the film Jim asks Aurora out on a date. He does this by getting a small robot to deliver a note to her. In order to successfully deliver the note, we have to program our little robots to follow a path, avoiding obstacles and dangers along the way. We are to make the robot to stop whilst it is on its way to do a couple of tasks (changing colour, doing a trick and pausing for a while). The lengths of each line, in order from start to finish, are 10, 8, 6, and 10 units. Easy, right? Wrong. This time, we have to program the robot by inputting commands and not simply drawing lines, something which is possible from the Ozobot website.
The website offers five different ability levels for us to do this – we’re put on an intermediate one where we can, in stages, tell the robot to do different things. This is very similar to computer programming where you simply drag and drop commands on-screen, one after the other. You assemble your moves one-by-one, and then send them to the robot who, hopefully does as you tell it to. As we do so, the machine does respond, and, along with our fellow journalists before long we have our ‘Arthur’ sending his love-note from Jim to Aurora, each of us acting as virtual match-makers for hypothetical daters.
So, hugely impressive, very satisfying and tons of fun. You can get a look at the Ozmobot and Robot Fun’s other robots at the end of the link above.
Passengers is available on digital download, 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray 3D™, Blu-ray™ & DVD now.
