I’ve just made it back from the 2008 New York Toy Fair. In the last five years I’ve been attending the show, this was definitely one of the best. One of the big reasons I attend is to see how technology is being applied to toys, both for fun and for learning. Year after year the Youth Electronics supercategory, a description within the toy industry to measure tech toy sales, grows by leaps and bounds. This year’s use of technology in toys was, for the most part, outstanding. Every year a number of themes present themselves at the show. Here’s are the themes I’ve seen at this years event:

• Social Networking, Virtual Worlds, and Web Connected Devices – I counted at least twelve new or relaunched social networking / virtual world destinations for children. Some had an offline product like a stuffed toy complete with a code to unlock an online destination. Others had a device that would connect to your computer via the USB port.
  
  
• Robots and Animatronic Devices – Many more robots this year. Mattel/Fisher-Price and Hasbro had some of the biggest announcements with robotic life-like dolls and animals. Also many more robot making kits were on display.
  
  
• Motion-based Products – The Nintendo Wii has definitely had its influence on the toy industry. New motion-based devices for children were on display. However, a number of these tech toy products can only detect motion on an XY plane.
  
  
• Green Products – A surprising number of companies were eager to tell you just how environmentally friendly their products were. From the materials used in their toys to the clever solutions discovered to power toys without batteries to the biodegradable packaging the product ships in. I was overwhelmed by the number of companies that were trying to do the right thing for the environment.
  
  
• High School Musical – The licensing groups at Disney must be working overtime. Many booths had products using the High School Musical brand to promote their new crop of toys.
  
  
• Dinosaurs – Last year I blogged that it would be the year of the guitar. This year it was noted that many dinosaur products will be coming out later this year. Some simply model kits, some stuffed toys, many robotic.

In the coming days I’ll be posting more information on a few of the products I think will become tech toy sensations later this year. Stay tuned!

Based on the buzz and advertising build up before this year’s NY Toy Fair, I’ve been predicting that the digital toy company Techno Source had a unique technology announcement to make. Just a few days before the show started, signs were pointing to a collaboration between Techno Source and Disney. Both were planning to deliver a big announcement on February 18 at Toy Fair. I made it to the press event and the news definitely raises the bar for the future of successful social networking sites and virtual worlds.

As the news outlets have been reporting since Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin, Disney is very interested in growing its online virtual world properties. in the last seven months we’ve seen a number of virtual world announcements from Disney. Disney and Techno Source jointly announced their work together to create the latest in virtual world experiences called Pixie Hallow and a physical extension to that world called Clickables. While you can create your own custom fairies today, the Pixie Hallow site will launch later this year.

Pixie Hallow is a virtual world where girls ages 8 – 12 can create their own fairy avatar and explore, better yet “fly”, through the magical fairy world. The world will also include many games and communication tools to interact with other fairies through a number of safe filtered, monitored and canned communication methods. As you can imagine, PixieHallow is beautiful, lush, and visually captivating world. However, the biggest surprise in this world is how Disney developed the art in this world. In true Disney fashion, this virtual world was developed using a multiplane camera technique often used in Disney animated features. This visual technique is also sometimes referred to as a parallax process which is often used to animate and bring alive background art. What’s so unique about this? It’s a striking visual technique that gives the illusion of depth in the virtual word that I have yet to see anywhere else online. It’s a 2D enhancement that ads a level of realism to the product. Each plane of the background moves at its own unique speed. Items in the foreground more at a faster speed than items in the background. If you’ve ever worked in Flash you know that Flash tends to choke on large moving animations. Flash generally doesn’t play nice when it comes to pushing multiple layers of full screen motion either, let alone a single layer of full screen art. Whatever Disney discovered to pull off the effect, I applaud their engineering and animation teams for their success. Job well done!

So Pixie Hallow is the Disney side of this announcement. Techno Source brings a complimentary and compelling experience to the party in the form of a technology called Clickables. Clickables in its simplest form, are like tiny little digital buttons that can be attached to any item; jewelry, notebooks, clothing, whatever. Each button contains a tiny piece of data inside. An initial use for these buttons is to create charms for bracelets. A bracelet can have many different dangling charms but also has a main touch pad location on the bracelet where charm information from a friend can be transferred and captured. Once the tiny bits of information are captured, the bracelet can be “docked” and that information will be uploaded to your virtual fairly account. When this is done, information about your friend is added to your account. The uploaded information also unlocks different online trinkets and game experiences as well.

The beauty of Clickables is that this social experience is not purely a virtual one. Clickables technology, combined with the Pixie Hallow virtual world, encourages real world interaction and real world engagement. Once you’ve physically met someone, clicked bracelets upload that shared, real world event to your Pixie Hallow account. No longer do you have to worry about connecting with people online that you’ve never met.

I’m seeing many unique possibilities for Clickables beyond the Pixie Hallow experience. Similar uses of the technologies could make attending real world exciting long after the event is over. Be prepared to see more announcements related to this new way of connecting with people in the physical world and then sharing more meaningful relationships online.

This year at the 2008 NY Toy Fair the buzz is strong with all things digital. Toys that connect to the web, toys that have a virtual worlds component, and robotic toys in many flavors. But none sum up the overall digital spirit of this year’s Toy Fair better than the latest Elmo doll announcement called Elmo Live. You have to see this product to believe it. Now I know what you’re thinking… “Tickle me Elmo was neat at first, and yes, the Elmo TMX (Tickle Me Extreme) doll released last year was also surprising, but I’m hard pressed to think how Fisher-Price could wow me with any future Elmo robotic doll.” Believe it or not, this new Elmo doll is pushing robotics in a way that will amaze you still!

Elmo can stand, wave its arms, move it’s mouth while talking, tell jokes and stories, and I imagine by the time the product ships on October 14th, will include a few additional surprises. To see video of the Elmo Live animatronic product, click below.

At a recent conference I attended, I was asked if I could put together a number of images related to technology toys from the past few decades. I’m a collector and if the toy has an “on” switch, batteries, and a microchip chances are it’s in my collection. I thought it might be interesting to put together images of these toys found in the patent filings with the US Patent office. The video below plays a montage of these patent images.

If you’re interested in the collection of these images to use as a screen saver, click here to download a zipped file of the images.

Below is a list of the toy patents I refer to in this video. It’s not a complete list by any means of all the great technology toys out there but a list of some noteworthy technology toys. If you have a favorite, please send me an email for a future update.

I’ve been wondering when RFID would begin to take a hold in the toy market. RFID is a technology that takes advantage of small wireless computer chips that have the ability to talk to one another. One way of thinking about the technology is that if a shirt had an RFID tag in it, whenever you dropped off the shirt at a dry cleaner, the radio frequencies emitted by the tag would alert some other computer in the store; it would know instantly who you are and how you would like your shirt laundered without ever saying a word to anyone. RFID allows any two (or more) items embedded with the technology to know about each other, and know how far away they are from each other. RFID used within toy products has the wonderful ability to work with the way children naturally play, and also offers new and imaginative enhanced play opportunities. Imagine a toy house complete with furniture, different dolls of family members, pets and vehicles that all could be electronically aware of each other. As the dog approaches the boy doll, the boy could speak the dog’s name. As a car drives up to the house, its headlights could turn on. As the mommy doll enters the front door, it could speak “Kids, I’m home!”

Earlier this year I posted an article about the technology toy product called Hyper Dash by Wild Planet. This technology toy product was also reviewed in the New York Times this past month. Hyper Dash takes advantage of RFID to put a new twist on outdoor games like Hide-and-Seek. A new entrant to the “aware” toy category (though I’ve learned that it does not use RFID technology) is called “Hide & Seek Blue and Sprinkles” developed by Fisher-Price. The concept is that one child hides the smaller plush toy named Sprinkles while another child uses the larger Blue to to help find where Sprinkles is hidden. Both characters deliver audio clues as to how well the seeking child is doing during the Hide-and-Seek game. Though the product is not yet officially being sold at stores, it looks like Target will have an exclusive in the early weeks the toy is available. This toy is also popping up for sale on eBay.

Stay tuned for more noteworthy smart toys with and without RFID enabled technology making their way to store shelves!