Air Whales, Helium Shortages, and the Baymax We Actually Deserve

Saw a video this week of a soft robot from Keio University, basically a helium blimp shaped like a friendly whale, that follows you around, nudges you awake, reminds you about things. People online are calling them “air whales” and honestly, that’s the correct name and I won’t hear another.

My first reaction was pure delight. My second reaction, about four seconds later, was: where does the helium come from, and how many MRI machines just got a little further away from getting serviced.

That’s not me being a wet blanket. It’s a genuine tension I can’t resolve neatly. Helium is finite, we use it for scanners and semiconductors and party balloons alike, and here we are inventing new ways to burn through it so a robot can drift around your bedroom saying, in my imagination, something suspiciously like “Hey, listen.” One commenter joked about swapping in hydrogen for “more exciting” laser battles, someone else pointed out that’s just adorable arson. Both things can be true. It can be a delightful bit of soft robotics research and also a slightly absurd use of a resource we’re already rationing for medical imaging. I don’t know how you weigh those against each other. Probably you don’t, until the day the hospital in Dandenong tells you the scanner’s down because of a supply issue, and then you weigh it very quickly.

The bit that stuck with me more than the helium argument, though, was how much people wanted this thing not for what it does, but for the company. Reminders, wake-up calls, a study buddy: none of that is revolutionary, your phone already does it. What people actually responded to was the idea of something following you around the house that isn’t trying to sell you anything, isn’t tracking your location for an ad network, just floats near you being quietly present. That’s a fairly modest wish. It’s also, if you think about it for more than ten seconds, exactly the sort of soft, ambient companionship that a lot of people don’t get enough of, especially living alone, especially older, especially far from family. Someone in the thread made a joke about it being a Baymax substitute and then didn’t really let themselves sit with why that joke landed so well.

We had a cat growing up that used to sit on the windowsill and watch birds for hours, dead still, utterly focused, completely unbothered by us. I think about that cat every time I see one of these gentle-robot demos, because the internet immediately clocked the same thing: no soft flying whale survives long-term contact with a cat. It’s true and it’s also beside the point. The appeal isn’t durability, it’s the fantasy of a bit of low-key, undemanding attention in a house that otherwise runs on notifications and demands.

Where this actually sits, long term, I have no idea. Soft robotics has been quietly ticking along in labs for years without much commercial traction, and I’d bet money this stays a research curiosity rather than something you buy at JB Hi-Fi next Christmas. The environmental cost of scaling anything like it, helium or battery or otherwise, needs answering before it goes anywhere near mass production. But there’s something genuinely nice buried in the goofiness of a whale-shaped balloon bumping gently into your art gallery experience, or drifting past your desk to remind you a meeting’s on. We spend a lot of energy building AI that argues with us, sells to us, or watches us. Building one that just floats along being quietly, uselessly kind isn’t the worst idea going.