[ From recode ]
“I’m here to see the robot strippers?”
That was me, Monday night, walking into a Las Vegas strip club in hopes of finding one of the more bizarre forms of entertainment near the Strip: A pair of pole-dancing robots I’d read about in an International Business Times article earlier that day.
The robots were an obvious gimmick during one of Las Vegas’s busiest weeks of the year — the 50th Consumer Electronics Show, a massive annual tech trade show full of geeky gadgets and gizmos, from touchscreens to cars to fancy electric trashcans. The Sapphire Gentleman’s Club, a strip club right off Vegas’ main drag, paid to showcase the robots as a way to drum up interest from press and customers.
As a first-time CES attendee, the gimmick worked on me: What could be more CES than pole-dancing robots?
The robots were as advertised: They gyrated on a stripper pole to music from 50 Cent and Pharrell, with dollar bills scattered on the stage and the floor. A half-dozen human dancers, most of whom were dressed in tight, shiny robot costumes, repeatedly took pics in front of their metallic colleagues. (The woman greeting guests as I walked in told me that I missed a skit where the human dancers unveiled the robot dancers to “Star Wars” music, and then joked about them stealing their jobs.)