History of Smart Toys
Modern smart toys have their early roots in clockworks such as those of the eighteenth and nineteenth century cuckoo clocks, music boxes of the nineteenth, and Disney audio-animatronics of the twentieth. Perhaps the biggest early contribution is from novelty and toy makers from the 1800s who made automatons such as Vaucanson's mechanical duck, von Kempelen's The Turk, and the Silver Swan. All pre-twentieth-century precursors had in common that they were mechanical contrivances. By the second half of the 1900s toys featuring built-in media players became common. For example, Mattel introduced a variety of dolls in the 1960s and 1970s that used a pull string activated talking device to make the dolls "talk" such as the talking Crissy doll and Chatty Cathy.
However, it remained until the introduction of the microprocessor in the mid-1970s for smart toys to come into their own. Texas Instrument's Speak & Spell which came on the market in the late 1970s was one of the first full-featured smart toys. The device is similar to a very limited lap-top with LED read-out. It is used for spelling games and guessing a "mystery code." It speaks and makes a variety of interesting sound effects. Another early example is Teddy Ruxpin, a robotic teddy bear which came out in the 1980s. It reads children's stories via a recording device built into its back and swivels its eyes and mouth.
Even the earliest toys from the nineteenth century on have in common with their modern-day smart toy counterparts that they appear to be sentient and lifelike, at least to the extent possible using the technology available at the time. Contemporary smart toys utilize speech recognition and activation; that is, they appear to comprehend and react to words that are spoken. Through speech synthesis smart toys speak prerecorded words and phrases. These kinds of technologies, when combined together, animate the toys and give them a lifelike persona.
Another hardware feature of modern smart toys is sensors which enable the smart toy to be aware of what is going on in its environment. These permit the toy to tell its orientation, determine if it is being played with indoors or outdoors, and know who is playing with it based upon the strength of the squeeze the child's hand gives it or similar factors. A typical example is Lego Mindstorms, a series of robotic-like devices, which integrate LEGO pieces with sensors and accessories. These toys include microcontrollers which control the robots. They are pre-programmed by personal computer and utilize light and touch sensors along with accelerometers. Accelerometers and temperature, pressure and humidity sensors, can also be used to create various effects by smart toy designers.
The development of smart toys received a major boost in 1998 when semi-conductor manufacturer, Intel, and toy maker, Mattel, Inc. entered into a joint venture to open a Smart Toy Lab in Portland, Oregon. This led to products that were marketed under the Intel Play brand. The first product in the line was the QX3 Computer Microscope. The Lab evolved into a toy company known today as Digital Blue, a division of Prime Entertainment, Inc. of Marietta, GA.
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