Posted on: Tuesday, April 12, 2005
You snooze you lose with this clock
By Roger Vincent
Los Angeles Times
After years of cowering helplessly as their owners bash them every morning, alarm clocks are starting to run away.
MIT Media Lab photo via AP That you have to get out of bed to hunt it down after it rolls off the nightstand is considered a good thing by slugabeds such as Clocky's creator, Gauri Nanda.
"I've hit the snooze button for, like, two hours," said the 25-year-old.
One reason Clocky is so effective — some might say diabolical — is that it's programmed to move randomly in distance and direction. It could come to rest across the room or under the bed before it resumes chirping.
"The idea is a hide-and-seek game in the morning, so you don't know where it's going to end up," Nanda said.
Several investors and retailers have approached Nanda, who hopes to see Clockys rolling off the manufacturing line within a year and selling for less than $30 each. The prototype is coated in carpet, which Nanda says may be replaced by a soft fabric.
Efforts to wake people by mechanical means date at least to the days of Leonardo da Vinci. One of the Renaissance man's lesser-known inventions was a device that woke a sleeper by gently rubbing his feet. The earliest recorded U.S. alarm clock was created by Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire in 1787, but the alarm rang only at one specified time that couldn't be set or altered.
Clocky, invented by a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is round, furry and has wheels. It takes off in search of a hiding place as soon as you hit the snooze button.
Clocky is a prototype alarm clock that runs away from you when you try to hit its snooze button. Sleepyheads have to get out of bed and find it to stop the alarm noise — and that's the whole point.
