With simple keyboard controls, this little robot can roll into a meeting and sit, turn to follow a speaker, roll out of the room to follow cooler dialogue, display video on its forehead, use a built-in laser pointer—pretty much anything to enable a remote colleague to participate in communications on a job site, be they formal or informal, as long as they're accessible by wheels and within an 8-hour battery life.
The cute bot has its clear limitations, but it's an improvement over the bigger and more limited formalities of common video conferences, where discussions are bound by an arbitrary length of time, static tables, chairs, and screens, organizational hierarchy, and other formal constructs that constrain the exchange of thoughts to a formula that is not always the source of the ideas that drive an organization. Since many productive ideas are generated at informal places like the break room, cafeteria or colleague's offices, the QB's ability to follow people and conversations from one place to another is very useful.
QB is made by Anybots, who envisions a coming reduction in business travel and its carbon footprint.