When students return to school this fall in the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York, a new kind of teacher will be ready to greet them. The small, rural district located on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to be one of the first in the country to put a humanoid robot in a classroom.
A bit creepy:
Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, Kiguel said. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m student number 1234,’ and then the robot will be like, ‘Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?”
And a sketchy backstory:
The classroom marks a new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com, that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which has spent decades creating hyperrealistic sex dolls and later expanded into sex robots that remain on the market today.
