Strawburry Miwk

A friend of mine who works in PR told me she was recently having trouble getting the press to pick up on one author’s children’s book series. The concept behind the books is novel (forgive the pun) enough: Describing old children’s games like kick the can and four square that have largely gone by the wayside with the advent of video games and television. The books have a fun story built around children playing these games, and the idea is to inspire kids to get off the couch and into their backyard…to kick a lousy can around…

Sarcasm aside, the author seems to have done everything right: Hired a professional artist to illustrate the series, put a seasoned PR person on gaining exposure, even chalking up contests and promotions to garner interest in this series that, you’d think, parents would be gobbling up for their kids. So why is no one picking up on it?

A quote I’ve collected from one Roy Blount may shed light on this: “People who want to keep on doing creative things for a living must be vigilant about any new means of transmitting their work.” The quote stemmed from a news article about authors defending their intellectual property rights over their work in light of such devices as Amazon’s Kindle (or now, Apple’s iPad), but made the point nonetheless about keeping up with new technology, be it to defend your rights over your work or for finding the best means of promoting yourself.

To that end, I’d like to introduce something that none of you will be able to read a word of unless you speak German: Wildwechsel by Andreas Kuhn. Wildwechsel, which roughly translates to “wild animal trail/crossing,” is a story about a fox that’s…trying to build a house? And he runs into a hog, helps a hippo with her emotional issues, and then…builds a robot? Clearly, I cannot read German, but that’s not the point. The point is, Wildwechsel is an online, interactive, animated children’s story book. I’m sure it’s not the first of its kind, but it is definitely the most sophisticated of its kind I’ve ever seen.

Screencap from Wildwechsel

Currently its only downside is the extremely long load time (if you opened in a new tab/window and gave up, please try it again…it’s definitely worth the wait!), but imagine if the technology behind this sort of storytelling became even more efficient. Imagine these kinds of stories becoming mainstream, with special applications being developed for portable reading devices like Kindle or iPad. If you do browse through Wildwechsel, you will notice a handful of pages give you two or three options to choose where to go next – imagine a classroom of young students, all with digital reading devices, reading such a story and discussing together about what options characters can take, and what the consequences might be. Already many are considering the implications of a digitized classroom; Interactive, animated children’s stories are but one example.

If I were the author of children’s stories about backyard games to play, I would think about taking a more digital, interactive route such as this. If you can power up an iPad, take it outside during a gym class and play a demo of how some backyard game might be played, and have the chance to try it for yourself, you might find a closer bond with the written stories connected to it. If the story involves animated characters that give you options to select as their tale progresses, then that’s guaranteed icing on the cake….and money in your bank, ideally.

Children’s books aren’t the only area in children’s entertainment where there is room for innovation. While it would seem there’s no way to go wrong with toys outside of using the wrong kind of paint on them, you can still bring the realm of online interactivity to physical objects, and make such toys more memorable, more talked about and thus more in demand.

While there is plenty to gripe about James Cameron’s latest film Avatar (which, believe me, I will get around to in this blog sooner or later…), the movie did have some undeniably cool creatures. I wandered down the toy isle while shopping today out of curiosity to see how such creatures translated into action figures after hearing some buzz about them on the web, and on an impulse buy, bought myself the Thanator. After some migraine-inducing assembly, he is now fully constructed and proudly on display next to my Lord of the Rings Wraith Rider and Edward Scissorhands figurines…yeah, I’m that kind of person.

The Thanator came with a thin piece of plastic with an ID-badge kind of sticker on it. This badge had the URL www.avataritag.com printed on it. I visited the site, downloaded the small software bundle, followed the on-screen instructions and before I knew it, this was appearing on my screen via my web cam:

Thanator Web Cam

Yes, a 3-D representation of the fearsome Avatar beast had appeared on my screen, and tilted whenever I tilted the card, always scratching with his paw and performing a series of animations. There was an “attack” button on my screen which would cause him to back off the platform and pounce forward again. Another button showed a pop-up with information on the creature, which you can see in the screenshot above. If you visit the i-tag site and click on “Demo,” you can get a rough idea of what this looks like.

Although I consider myself to be pretty well-seasoned when it comes to technology, this nonetheless blew me away and put an instant smile of amazement on my face. This is definitely a stunning innovation as far as toys and action figures go, albeit limited by a few things. As the site and toy packaging clearly state, a web cam and high-speed Internet connection are required for this to work, and some light software is needed (all-in-all this took me roughly 5 solid minutes, though I can imagine today’s busy parent not having the time, patience or know-how for such a thing…especially after spending close to a half-hour assembling the darn thing). The i-tag must be visible by the web cam in order for the creature to display; When I tilted it too far back, the Thanator kept disappearing and wouldn’t re-appear until I held the badge up in plain view in my web cam. Lastly, as the demo suggests, the only real fun you can have with a single toy is moving it about and seeing its animation loop or activating its one “attack” move, unless you purchase more toys to interact with one another on the screen.

As a kid, I was an avid fan of Nintento’s Duck Hunt, a game that allowed you to shoot a plastic gun at your tv screen to zap pixelated ducks out of the air (in case you don’t remember!). Much more recently, I became enthralled with the Wii (Nintendo again, of course…they’re on to something here) and its Fit/Fit Plus games, which monitors your balance and activity on its Balance Board and displays your Mii performing similar actions on the screen. While combining a plastic toy with the online i-Tag system doesn’t yet offer the same kind of long-term play, it challenges what a traditional toy should be or do, much like Duck Hunt or the Wii have challenged traditional, on-screen, push-button video games.

There is definitely much more that can be said or explored on these two examples and more, but for now I will simply wrap this up here and keep my eyes peeled for other online innovations of traditionally tangible things. I wonder if, very soon, the idyllic family scene will no longer be images of reading children bedtime stories or watching them play with their new toys next to the Christmas tree; -Instead, they’ll gather around the computer and digitally explore a story or unwrap gifts made of 1s and 0s… Such new creative transmission of work will certainly be interesting to watch.