Evander Batson
xinhe feng
FluffyLeecy
frankiezek
gaboratparsons
giang063
gracegotlost
lauriewaxman
Siwen Li
Tim Xiaofeng Lin
Yury Gitman
mar28th
Max(TONG WEN)
Soohyun
sabotai
Susan Lin
Toys, Toys, Toys
Taking advantage of our time off from class yesterday, a large group of us went to to the Toy Fair for the greater part of the afternoon. The show was huge, almost overwhelming, and like Yuri said, just the time to walk the floor without even stopping to look would take hours. Fortunately, a lot of booths were obviously not worth stopping at, which gave a few of us guys a chance to spend more time at the fun ones.
My favorite section was definitely where the hi-tech electronic toys were being shown. This section of the show had tons of tows that were doing new and interesting things, and seemed to be experimenting more with product character in much more interactive ways. One of the first that got me pretty excited was Tandars, a little forest creature that has a lot of functionality built into a cute, little body.
The booth itself is actually what first attracted me to Tandars. With its forest-like appearance, it really stood out. The booth really added to the ambient feel of the toy, and it placed the creature in his natural habitat. It was perfect. The creature has sensors all over it’s body so that it detects touching and petting, and proximity sensors to detect when something or someone is nearby. It apparently has over 50 “phrases”, which combined with its eye motions and moving ears, really gives you the impression that it is alive and has emotions. Also, if you get two tandars next to each other, they detect each other through IR and communicate. The lady working the booth was obviously really happy to show him off, and she seemed to really have a bond with her Tandars.
Around the corner from there was a game I had recently heard about but didn’t understand until I saw it. Tetris Link is essentially Tetris meets Connect 4. I played most of a round with Andy, Scott and the girl who was working the booth. It was definitely a lot of fun, a nice adaptation of a video game into the board game realm.
And here we are playing with the giant tetris pieces. Scott was trying to use his piece to ruin my place in the photo, just like he tried to do in the game.
And the product I saw the most potential in, as far as finding ways for the concepts and technology to be adapted and used by a variety of companies and businesses, is the video game Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. Instead of saving your game progress and character to the memory on the console, all of your attributes are stored in a small action figure which gets placed on the “portal” hooked up to your game machine (in this case, a Wii). As you build up your character and make advancements, those things get stored in the memory chip of the action figure itself. Then, when you go to play at a friends house or on a different system, you can just set your character on their portal and play with your character. Another interesting feature is the ability to swap out characters at any time. I can see a lot of strategic potential for using one character instead of another at different points in a game.
The portal itself seems to have some pretty cool tech in it. Figurines only need be placed on it, and almost instantly all of the connections are made and the character is in the game. When a new figurine is placed on top, the portal changes color, depending on the type of power that character has. And with each action you make in the game, the portal seamlessly syncs up the figurine to reflect the character’s latest stats.
The figurines are just about three inches tall and feel like the figurines we saw all over the show, but knowing that the character in the game that you may have spent hours building up and developing makes it seem more special. It’s as if the figurine somehow was that video game character, and vice versa. One of the guys at the show booth mentioned that this development could have a deeper level of meaning, too, when kids started to trade their figurines or started collecting them. A level 7 character would be more valuable than a level 3, and perhaps the rarity or specialness of certain characters would provide a built-in sort of stock market for these characters. Could be interesting, and I really look forward to seeing where this kind of technology goes.
Making Toys 
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