Yukai Engineering's Fufuly and Lightony first look at CES 2023

Yukai Engineering, the team behind the strangely adorable cat tail pillow, is back with a new quirky invention. Unveiled at CES 2023, the Fufuly is yet another anxiety-reducing cushion from the Japanese company, but this time featuring a gentle rhythmical pulsation as the main therapeutic tool. Another new device shown off by Yukai Engineering was Lightony, a cute humanoid bedside lamp which literally nods off after a while. Supposedly, the robot's life-like head tilt and eye roll movements will encourage you to fall asleep faster, though it's also possible that kids would just stay up as they play with this toy. Lightony also responds to voice commands (all processed locally instead of the cloud), so you can tell the robot to set a countdown when you're in bed, or say "good morning" to wake it up.

Video transcript

RICHARD LAI: Another year, another CES. And as always, before the main show, we here at CES Unveiled 2023. And at this booth, we'll check out the Fufuly, which is the latest cushion toy from Yukai Engineering. And I kind of want one.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the idea behind this Fufuly is that it's a pulsating cushion. So apparently, if you're hugging onto something or someone that has this breathing pattern, the two of you would eventually synchronize. So by holding on to the Fufuly, you would eventually feel a bit less stressful. So it reduces your anxiety.

And in fact, when I tried this earlier in a quiet room, I could even hear some like a cat purring noise. But I was told that this was not intentional. So I was definitely hearing some mechanical noise inside it. But it's quite pleasant.

You can tell by the shape that it's like a thought bubble. So supposedly, it reminds you of air. So air and breathing-- they kind of go together. So in terms of features, there are three modes. You've got the regular breathing pattern, you've got the deep breathing pattern. So it depends on how much calming down you need.

And then there's also another more bizarre training mode, which we won't go into just yet. And obviously, it's operated by some batteries inside. But like I said, we haven't really had much opportunity to see the insides.

But I would imagine it's also machine washable as long as you take out the guts. And as far as availability goes, they're planning on launching this sometime this year first in Japan through crowdfunding. But they hadn't quite determined a price point yet.

Another new device unveiled by Yukai Engineering at CES Unveiled is the Lightony. So it's like light and tony. Get it? And this is a bedside lamp which responds to your voice.

And the idea is that you can use voice to tell Lightony to start nodding off at a certain time or certain point. The nodding of motion, like you can see now-- you see the tired eyes and the nodding motion. Supposedly, this encourages you to fall asleep as well.

So if you're the kind of person who struggles to fall asleep quickly such as myself, maybe you can try getting a Lightony so that you can both nod off at around the same time. And in the morning, you can say, good morning, and Lightony would wake up like this.

So it's kind of cute and fun and potentially practical. But right now, there are no go-to market plans just yet. So we're going to keep an eye on the development of the Lightony. For more CES 2023 coverage, please stay tuned to Engadget.