Suwappu! Awesome augmented-reality toy concept

Back in January, one of the trends I called out for 2011 (see #5) was that we'd see more of gaming virtual and physical worlds meeting.

Latest thing to come across my radar (via BoingBoing) is Suwappu, a design concept by London design firms Berg and Dentsu (London office).

Some thoughts on the concept:

- I *LOVE* the idea of using AR to do/modify the facial expressions.

- The twitter feeds seem weak - especially the prius ads, ugh - though I'd like to see each Suwappu character have their own twitter feed, or a series of them depending on mood/context. Like networked tamagochi.

- Facial expressions might be hard due to latency (faces drifting on bodies). Maybe has to wait for higher-power smartphones, or ship it with a little smartphone tripod (note: I wrote this before the video was finished playing, turns out they used one too) so it remains stationary. Work the fiction such that the tripod/phone is a "doorway" for kids.

It may be design concept now, but seems a natural fit for someone to pick up on. A very feasible leap from things like UBFunKeys (which I spoke about back in 2007).

The Onslaught of Toys-Featuring-Online-Games continues

I recently blogged about the wave of kids toys that are shipping with online games (in some cases multiplayer/mmo-ish games) as 'features' - a checklist item to help sell the game.

Well, here's another to add to the list:

Swypeout is a collectible card game that ships with a USB device with a bar code reader. Cards can be swiped through the reader, and then the car appears in an online racing game. Kids can then race their cars against others. Video trailer of gameplay below, and card example below that.

This is sort of Pod (dating myself) meets Motor City Online (dating myself again) meets Toon-town.

I include the Toon-town reference because like with that MMO, chat is via picking from canned phrases, and no path to lead to outside Internet, thus alleviating parents fears of card-swiping child molesters and the like.

This is an interesting one to keep an eye on for two reasons:

First off, it's more of a real-time 3D action game. The spend on the client (from screenshots & movies, I havent' downloaded it yet) looks to be bigger than that of UBFunkeys or the others.

Secondly, it skews older. The toy states "6 and up", but you look at the boys in the video on the site (whom I presume are representative of the target customer), and they look 10-13-ish. Now we are heading into the demographic that competes with (tongue firmly in cheek) 'real games'.

There's no such thing as a free lunch

...is what dad used to say.

So if you read my last post, and did your homework, you should have thought of some instances in which games could be given away (maybe DRM free?) and developers/publishers could recoup in some other fashion.

Well, advertising of course is the first thing that springs to mind. It works for part of the music industry, it works for television, and already works for parts of the games industry.

I think another really interesting area of the market to watch is what's happening with kids toys these days is something the industry should watch closely. I've discussed this before, but let's take another look.

It started with Webkinz:

In which the online world is free with purchase of a plush doll.

And now you have UBFunkeys, a comparable model, but the dolls connect via usb.


And Barbiegirls, where it's more like an MMO, since you can actually communicate with other players and the like. The "doll" is also an MP3 player and connects via USB.


Next thought exercise is whether this same model could be extrapolated to 'give away' a big budget single player title or MMO with, say, the purchase of your Mercedes...