It’s like a docking station, except it’s shaped like a little robot dog and your iPhone serves as its face. You’ll need the SmartPet app, of course, but that will allow your little plastic companion to wag its tail, walk around, sit up and more. And yes, there’s voice recognition in there for commands, as well as gestures and touchscreen interfaces. The iPhone “face” has several expressions too.

Considering that the SmartPet is coming by way of Bandai, it’s not surprising that some of its Tamagotchi digital pet heritage is spilling over too. You can add accessories, check the health of your digital pooch, feed virtual medicine through the touchscreen, and more. Unlike real dogs, the SmartPet can be used to play music too. Look for SmartPet to hit Japanese retailers later this month for 7,800 JPY (about US$100).

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The concept comes by way of Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Melbourne. What they’ve done is taken the standard Parrot AR.Drone quadracopter and loaded it with some specialized software. By doing so, the drone will lock in on the user (you) and follow you around as you go for your run around the neighborhood. It’s also designed to help you maintain a certain pace, so if you start to lag behind, it’ll fly on ahead and “motivate” you to keep up. Because you wouldn’t want to lose your $300+ toy.

There is definitely room for improvement, of course. You could equip Joggobot to keep the path lit when you go for a run at night, for example, or they could set it up to have better controls… perhaps with Kinect-esque motion-based waving to get the Joggobot to speed up or slow down. The other snag is the 20-minute battery life, which doesn’t leave you with a very big window for a good jog.

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The way that we interact with computers has changed significantly over the years. We went from reading simple text, to pointing with mice, to tapping on touchscreens. The Sifteo cube changes that again and you can start placing your pre-orders as of right now.

You might remember the prototypes that were shown off during TED 2009, but the crux of it is that they are “intelligent” cubes with displays that can interact with one another. Think of them in much the same way as traditional building blocks, except they’re all interconnected mini-computers. Sifteo calls it the world’s first Intelligent Play Platform.

The starter kit for the Sifteo cubes include three of these blocks, as well as the charging dock, USB radio link for connecting the cubes wirelessly to your computer, the Siftrunner desktop application, and the Sifteo Creativity Kit. Think of it like an SDK. They’ve also preloaded Siftrunner with a couple of games, giving you a sense of what you can do.

No, these cubes aren’t going to replace full computers, but they could completely change the way we have fun and play. The starter kit is $149 and extra cubes are $45 each.

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