After resisting robot home vacuum technology for years, Dyson is poised to enter the market with the 360 Eye. The company spent sixteen years and US$47 million dollars developing it, or so it says. The promotional video makes a good case for why it took so long and so many dollars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS5fgZHg6Pk

If priced reasonably, I’m pretty certain this will be a hit. The industrial design, as is to be expected, is sleek and distinctive too—if a bit menacing. That’s not helped, I don’t think, by the terrible product name. It makes me a bit uneasy to think of an autonomous machine freely roaming my house whose chief attribute is that it’s all seeing. Consumer technology has been getting more and more intrusive all the time without us really asking for it; now that nefarious quality is being marketed to us too, it seems.

More at dyson360eye.com.