You’ve had a long day. You finally get home, fling the door open, plonk on the couch, and let out a big sigh. In the corner of your eye, you notice your mushroom lamp perk up. Its microphone must have heard you come in. Its head raises to reveal round, animated eyes, and a little diamond-shaped nose—which actually houses a camera.
It does a little jiggle because it sees you’re back. Its name is Mori.
As you move around the space—maybe it’s time to start cooking dinner—the little robot’s face follows you, observing your movements and making soft sounds that are a cross between a bird and R2-D2. The day’s stress catches up, and you need a moment to relax, so you head over to Mori, touch its head, and its eyes and camera-nose dip back inside its body. It goes back to being a lamp, except now it plays nature soundscapes so you can feel at ease.
That’s the pitch from OKA, or One Kind Artifact, a new startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Shenzhen, China, focusing on experimental technology. CEO Hua Wang tells WIRED he wants his company to create five experimental “Artifacts” over the course of OKA’s lifetime. Mori is the first.
Courtesy of OKA
“There are certain relationships in this era we want to fix between humans and our surroundings—human with nature, human with one another—every product is an experience trying to reconnect some of those relationships,” Wang says. Before cofounding OKA, he was a general manager at Meipai, a video-sharing app from the Chinese phone brand Meitu. He also cofounded Bondee, a now-defunct social media app that briefly went viral in Asia.
According to the company, the point of Mori, the nearly 12-inch-tall home robot lamp, is to reconnect its owners with nature. It can play nature soundscapes. It will glow different colors—inspired by rain, forests, fire, and wind—while reacting to your movements. It can guide you through a calming breathing session.
It also uses its built-in camera and microphones to serve as a fun little interactive companion in your home. Ask it how your outfit looks, and Mori will jiggle excitedly. If you’re playing music or watching TV, Mori can dance to the tunes and react to the action on your TV screen.
It intentionally does not do anything else. Unlike an Amazon Echo, it isn’t an assistant: You can’t use voice commands to control smart lights or cue up Spotify tracks, and it won’t answer if you ask about the weather.