By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
July 2, 2001 — Haley Joel Osment plays a child robot in search of his humanity in the weekend’s futuristic hit movie, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”
Toy designer Chris Myers didn’t have Steven Spielberg’s movie in mind when he said toys are on the
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| The LEGO MINDSTORMS Exploration Mars expansion set is one in a series of robotic devices powered by small tech. It combines LEGO pieces with sensors and sensor-related accessories. |
Myers sees:
- A doll that can tell who is picking it up by analyzing the pressure applied by individual fingers and react accordingly. If it’s 2-year-old Susie, it coos back with baby talk. If it’s the 9-year-old, it might say, “So, did you go to school today, Billy?”
- Toys that automatically know if they are being played with inside or outside and pattern their behavior accordingly. Things you throw could go slower and travel shorter distances inside, for example, to lessen the chances of breaking Mom’s lamp.
- Frisbees or other flying toys you can program to do barrel loops and wild aerobatics in midflight before they continue on to their target.
“Sensors will be the first to be widely used, because right now that’s where there’s been the most applied research,” says Myers. “You’ll pick up a toy and it’ll know who’s using it, and the environment it’s in. We’ll have toys for kids that will seem alive.
“They’ll be smart. They’ll react to you. The toy can judge who’s holding it, if it’s outside or not. It’ll say, ‘Hey, we’re outside, let’s play this.’ ”
Says Jennifer Soloway, marketing director for Wild Planet Toys Inc. of San Francisco, “There will be things they do that we can’t even conceive of today, and at a cheaper price point.”
And therein is the rub. The MEMS-based sensors and actuators that will power those capabilities are available today. But they are still too expensive, say toy executives, to allow most toy companies to hit their price target. In Wild Planet’s case, that range is $10 to $25.
Some toy designers think it might be five years or more before the technology is cheap enough to be widely available. Myers, one of four designers at Wild Planet, says it will happen much sooner than that — as soon as two.
Wild Planet makes high-tech toys, but not yet small tech toys. Four toys it will bring to market in the fall are in its spy line — Spy Vision Scope, a head-mounted telescope that, with a touch of a button, flips into place for spying; Spy Door Alarm, a remote-controlled gizmo that fits over a child’s doorknob and alerts him or her to intruders; Spy Listener, sunglasses with a mini-eavesdropping device that picks up sounds from 30 feet away; and Spy Night Scope, binoculars by day that become night-vision goggles by night.
All four retail between $14 and $20.
Myers says he scouts out high-tech innovations for possible applications to his toy line. “I try to bring new technology into the company through research into other fields.”
As for sensors, actuators and other small tech innovations he’s come across, he says, “I’m always amazed at what I see. But, basically we’re waiting. The technology has to fit our cost range. Cost is number one.”
“I’m amazed at the things I make today and see on the market. Things I saw as science fiction as a kid are possible today. And it’s going to get more and more incredible.”
Myers says he remembers being amazed by a hand-held Mattel toy in the mid-1970s. It purported to be a racetrack, though in reality it was just a crude LED display on a tiny screen. “To play with that today, it seems so funny. I show it to kids and they say, ‘What’s this?’ It doesn’t look like a racecar. It doesn’t look like a track.’
“Today, look at LEGO MINDSTORMS. A research scientist would have killed for that technology 20 years ago.”
MINDSTORMS are a series of robotic devices powered by small tech. It combines LEGO pieces with sensors and sensor-related accessories.
COST IS BIGGEST HURDLE
Frank Ostrander is the engineering manager for the New York office of Techno Mind Ltd., a Hong Kong-headquartered firm that does original design, engineering and manufacturing for other toy retailers around the world. Its factory in China employs 3,000.
Techno Mind did design work for Amazing Amy, the Playmates Toys doll that was the smash hit of 1999. Using an eight-bit microcontroller and toy foods embedded with different value resistors, Amy could tell its holder, for example, that it didn’t want a piece of pizza when it was touched to her lips.
Making the leap from resistors to sensors and actuators is getting closer, says Ostrander. “But the toy industry has very strong price constraints. To make it into the toy industry, the price has to come down. The chip or enabling technology has to come down to $2.”
That it will, he has no doubt. He says small tech features in the next generation of toys will include the full range of sensors — pressure, resistance, magnetic, temperature, motion, tilt and acceleration — in addition to handwriting and speech recognition.
But for now, the interest in small tech, he says, “is an interest on behalf of the toy inventors.” The interest by the manufacturers still lags.
“We haven’t had much involvement in tiny sensors and actuators, yet, though I am sure that we will,” he says.
Skyline Toys of Palo Alto, Calif., is a toy-invention studio that has licensed more than 100 toys to such manufacturers as Fisher-Price, Hasbro, Tiger Electronics and Mattel.
Among its toys are NASCAR racers, Fib Finder, a hand-held miniature lie detector, Aerobic Football and the WWF Talking Doorbell.
Adam Skaates is a Skyline designer who did MEMS work while he was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Colorado. He says Skyline prides itself on getting high-tech into its toys. “It gives us an advantage to put technology into our toys.
“This is kind of a weird industry. Even the big guys don’t dedicate a lot of resources to research and development. They rely on inventors to bring them technology.”
He, too, says that the current cost of MEMS devices is too high to allow toys to hit the price target of $9.95 to $19.95 that he says most companies aim for.
“But having said that, I still think there’s a future for MEMS in toys,” he said.
Skaates said he has built prototype toys using MEMS accelerometers, but when the companies went from prototype to manufacturing, they replaced the accelerometers with cruder, less effective, but cheaper, mechanical devices, such as rolling metal balls that hit an electrical contact or spring.
“It’s unsophisticated, but cheap,” he says.
He says he invented one “Harry Potter” toy that used an Analog Devices accelerometer. “The toy maker said ‘That’s cool,’ but then figured out a cheaper way to do it. When sensors get down to $1 or $2, they’ll use them. Accelerometers are close to that now.”
THE FUTURE IS INTERACTIVE
John Sosoka is co-founder and chief technology officer at Neurosmith 2000, a Long Beach, Calif., company that builds interactive learning toys for children as young as 1 year old.
A former computer programmer with expertise in computer-aided modeling and machining, Sosoka says he has been an avid follower of MEMS and nanotechnology as it has evolved over the years.
About a year ago, he hired a doctoral student to do an overview on MEMS and sensor technologies and how they might apply to upcoming product lines. The conclusion was that cost was still too high. “It’s not that far away. Maybe a few years,” he says.
“We’ve got a new product we’re getting ready to release, a big, spongy block that can tell its orientation. It does it with a caged ball like a tilt sensor in a pinball machine. We would have loved to be able to get something that gave us a lot more resolution, but we just couldn’t afford the sensing.”
Sosoka says there are many ways sensors can — and will — be used in toys geared toward the very young. The toys could interact differently with different kids in the family, they could be much more smart and engaging and they could also impart information to parents.
For example, is a toy being used a lot? And which kids in the family are using it? MEMS devices could store that information and download it to parents later.
Or they could give feedback on where a young child was in the house or the yard.
Neurosmith sells a toy called MusicBlocks. Each block has a segment of a melody. Each side of the block renders the melody a different way — one side might be singing, another a violin, another a piano, for example. Kids use the blocks not just to build shapes, but to build sounds and songs.
Sosoka says that someday he’d like to incorporate accelerometers and temperature, pressure and humidity sensors into the blocks to create many more permutations of sound, to “create a much different musical experience. You can do lots of different stuff.
“At the point in time when my son or daughter is buying toys for my grandchildren, the toys will seem much more animate. And not in the Furby sense. They will react to you in such sensible ways. These toys will have a subtle understanding of what is happening around them.
“They won’t be so inane. It won’t be like it is now where you put a doll down and it keeps fussing, or you walk in a room and it starts making sounds.
“I’m open to using all kinds of sensors,” says Sosoka. “My goal is to have my products react in the kind of way dogs and cats do. To have them have a sense of what is going on around them.”
Related story: Robot dogs and LEGOS that think
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 233.