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History of Anki and Digital Dream Labs

  • mid 2017 - late 2018: Vector was created.
    • Anki wanted to create a Cozmo 2.0 of sorts. A Cozmo which could be fully autonomous.
    • In order to create a robot which would actually sell, they created a new personality for this robot.
  • late 2018 - early 2019: Anki was creating many different products at the same time in order to try to stay afloat in a VC-led environment.
    • Bingo
      • There would have been a mini version and a big version.
      • Both would roam the floor on two wheels, performing helpful tasks. Kind of like Amazon Astro
    • Pirouette
      • Appears to be a kiosk but cute.
      • Not much is known.
      • Might have been created for the company Anki's board planned to sell Anki to at some point.
    • Whiskey
      • Actually got pretty far into development.
      • Essentially a Vector but with two extra ToF sensors on the face for much better spatial awareness (theoretically).
      • Some DVT1 prototypes have made it out into the wild.
  • April 29th, 2019: Anki announced their liquidation.
  • May 1st, 2019: Anki officially went out of business.
  • January 2020: Digital Dream Labs announced that they bought the assets.
  • TODO: recount the misdoings of DDL in this time
  • July 2023 - September 2024: DDL servers go down due to them not paying the bill for their AWS instance while they were still taking money from their customers
  • September 2024: DDL gets new CEO Zack Anton and the servers come up a few weeks later.
  • 2024: victor and vicOS-oelinux leaked to github with encrypted keys.
  • April 30th, 2025: Vector's keys get cracked and a unlock ota has been released to convert prod bots into dev bots.