entertainment
Projects video onto walls and floors, follows you around
Controlled demoVerified January 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- Staged demos only
Research record R-012Discontinued
Ballie
By Samsung Electronics · South Korea · announced January 2020
Samsung's rolling projector companion, announced three times across six years and shelved indefinitely without a single unit sold.
Broader research scope
This is a research record, not a curated recommendation.
The main field guide selects 14 companion robots for deeper review. This entry belongs to a separate 53-record index that also covers industrial, research, and developer systems.
Research summary
What the record says.
Ballie debuted at CES 2020 as a tennis-ball-sized rolling companion, returned at CES 2024 grown to bowling-ball size with a projector, and was re-announced at CES 2025 with Google Gemini integration and a promised 2025 launch in Korea and the United States. That launch never came.
After missing its first-half 2025 window and slipping repeatedly through the year, Bloomberg reported on January 7, 2026 that Ballie had been shelved indefinitely; it was absent from CES 2026, and by March 2026 its page had been removed from samsung.com. Samsung now describes Ballie as an internal innovation platform for spatial and ambient AI work.
No price or full specification sheet was ever published, and no consumer ever bought one. Ballie remains the clearest recent example of why this site records a product's status history: six years of headlines described a home robot that never existed as a product.
Delivery evidence
Announcement is not arrival.
Not demonstrated
None, ever
Capability ledger
What has actually been shown?
3 material claims are separated by evidence setting and human involvement. The strongest recorded signal is Controlled demo; it does not automatically transfer to every row.
security
Home and pet monitoring
Controlled demoVerified January 2026
- Control mode
- Not disclosed
- Human intervention
- Not disclosed
conversation
Gemini-powered conversation
Controlled demoVerified January 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- Not disclosed
Hardware record.
- Height
- Unknown / not disclosed
- Weight
- Unknown / not disclosed
- Locomotion
- Rolling spherical body
- Payload
- None
- Runtime
- Not disclosed
- Charging
- Not disclosed
- Top speed
- Not disclosed
- Degrees of freedom
- Rolling drive plus projector gimbal
- Hands
- None
- Face / expression
- Projector used for expressions and content
- Sensors
- Cameras, microphones, spatial sensors (as demonstrated)
Software record.
- AI platform
- Google Gemini integration announced at CES 2025
- Voice
- Conversational assistant demonstrated
- Languages
- Korean and English demonstrated
- Visual recognition
- Pet and home monitoring demonstrated
- Memory
- Not disclosed
- Processing
- Cloud-dependent design
- Autonomous abilities
- Follow, patrol and projection routines in demos
- Teleoperation
- Not disclosed
- Software updates
- Not applicable
- Developer access
- None
Who can see, hear, or take control?
- Recording storage
- Never documented
- Remote operation possible
- Unknown / not disclosed
- Teleoperation disclosure
- Never documented
- Camera / microphone controls
- Never documented
- Data deletion
- Never documented
- Account required
- Samsung account expected; never documented
- Emergency stop
- Never documented
- Children and pets
- Never documented
- Security updates
- Never documented
Lifecycle record
Status history.
- Concept
First shown at CES 2020
- Prototype
Redesigned Ballie with projector at CES 2024; '2024 launch' claimed
- Public demonstration
CES 2025 re-announcement with Gemini; first-half 2025 launch promised
- Public demonstration
Still delayed after missing every 2025 window
- Discontinued
Bloomberg: shelved indefinitely; absent from CES 2026; page later removed from samsung.com
Source register
3 linked sources.
These sources support the research record as a whole. Unlike the curated dossiers, this imported record does not yet map every claim to a stable source ID.