From...

December 21, 1998
Web posted at: 10:30 AM EST

by Rebecca Sykes

(IDG) -- Not many workplaces contain vast bins of Legos, but at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the popular Danish building blocks are a needed tool for creating the toys of the future.

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The Media Lab's Toys of Tomorrow group is charged with conceiving the technology behind toys bound for store shelves five to 10 years in the future.

"The basic charter is, is there something about new technology that we at the Media Lab can give to play?" said Brian Smith, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. "Half the charter is to build things that are weird and fun and kind of nutty."

Soft music

Fitting the bill is the Squeeze Tuba, a U-shaped foam tuba the size of an adult's arm and covered in soft, squeezable velvet. The Squeeze Tuba is an accessible entree to music for kids. Too often, children are introduced to music via dry theory, according to Tod Machover, an assistant professor of music and media at MIT.

"For years I've wanted a musical interface that would let me push and twist and jab," said Machover, who is also a cellist and a composer.

The Squeeze Tuba has sensors sewn into its fabric and can be programmed to emit notes and noises. The tuba can also be set to play a continuous sound that changes in pitch or clarity when the player manipulates the soft instrument. For example, if someone plunges their fingers into the Squeeze Tuba and moves them aggressively and rapidly, the sound will be "electronic and quick," Machover said.

The Squeeze Tuba need not be plugged in to work. But it can connect to home theaters or to other music toys. Machover expects the Squeeze Tuba and sibling instruments to be commercially available in about two years.

"We wanted to make them quite inexpensive and completely conceivable to distribute in a fairly large quantity and ... make a dent in the way kids are introduced to music," Machover said.

The story quilt

Introducing kids to stories of the past is the idea behind Story Mat, the brainchild of Kimiko Ryokai, a 23-year-old Media Lab graduate student from Japan.

The Story Mat prototype is a quilt Ryokai's mother made when Ryokai was a child. The quilt depicts a townscape including houses, trees, lakes, and a meandering railroad track, and Ryokai spent hours as a child telling stories on the mat by moving stuffed animals or other toys across it. For reasons long forgotten, many of Ryokai's stories took place on a patch of quilt bearing a parking lot with seven numbered spaces.

"It's too bad that I can't get to the stories I told many years ago," Ryokai said.

With Story Mat, Ryokai hopes to provide a link to stories previously told. A basic voice recorder picks up the verbal story and a mat-sized sensor under the quilt captures the travels of the toys. Children can retrace their routes on the quilt, guided by an overhead projector casting a beam. Originally, the toy used a wireless mouse, but that could only register relative position and would be interrupted if the mouse broke contact with the quilt.

Touching a toy to a particular location on the Story Mat may activate the audio and visual record of an earlier story.

Ryokai said her mother was surprised, but pleased, that Ryokai is basing her graduate work at MIT on the quilt.

"She would never imagine that it would go to the United States and be played with by many children," Ryokai said.

Virtual chicken

The Media Lab is chock-full of stuffed animals. The Story Mat toys are down the hall from chickens in varying states of assembly. The demo chicken--with a soft yellow chicken belly covering its steely electronics-filled spine -- can interact with a cartoon swamp on a projection screen. Wiggle the toy chicken's wings and the onscreen chicken flaps up in the air, beyond the reach of the onscreen cartoon raccoon. Waddle the chicken toward the swampy onscreen horizon and the onscreen chicken heads straight that way, though it displays a penchant for veering to the side.

"Our stated mission is to think five to 10 years out, so sometimes things work but are a little sketchy, because the hardware isn't discovered yet," said Bill Tomlinson, a 26-year-old Media Lab graduate student.

The chicken game runs on a Silicon Graphics workstation, but a home PC and TV may power it by the time the toy is released.