Kurt Shintaku's Blog

This is a project that Microsoft Research has been working on:  WiFi-enabled, Robotic Teddy Bear.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/005282.html

Research has a Powerpoint on the topic here:
http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/FS2005/presentations/FacultySummit_2005_Bathiche.ppt

Keep in mind, my dear customer, that the bear itself is not a product but rather a research project being done by our vaunted $7 billion/year R&D division on how consumers may interact with toys and playthings in the future.  No – we’re not getting into the "toy industry", albeit we have had smashing successes in the Microsoft Actimates "Barney the Dinosaur" & "Arthur" dolls which Consumer Reports called the Breakout Hit of 1997 and Family Fun Magazine declared the Toy of the Year.  Even Parents Magazine named it "Top Toy of the Year".  (http://www.current.org/tech/tech801b.html)

Note that there are some comments about the bear’s movements being "creepy" however, the exact same things we’re said about the Barney toy and it was a runaway hit – children didn’t see it as "creepy" but as a fun loveable toy that they could really interact with.  My mom is a 1st grade teacher and she still uses the dall I bought her back in 1997 to this day.

I’ve read in the papers where the children’s toy industry has become a game of low cost one-upsmanship but it appears that our R&D folks are looking to help crack, what I USA Today called, the current "wall of stagnation".  I’m sure at one point, our R&D folks will make it so that the XBox will have something to do with all of this… like linking your Teddy Bear to a children’s game on the XBox or something… one can only wonder.

We have several of these ideas in the hopper – making innovative uses of technology and marrying them with toys to create new experiences.  I’ve seen several of them internally however unforunately, the Teddy Bear concept is the only one we’ve made public out of Research so far.  I think as the Christmas season comes, we may hear more publicly about what else is in the pipe from Microsoft Research in the area of children’s toys.

I hope we get to <ahem> partner with someone with innovative thinking as well on some of these ideas at some point.  When we created the Barney Doll – the one that won all those awards back in 1997 – we partnered up with a little company called Fisher Price to do the manufacturing.