Noise and Toys — Chirp powering Interactive Toys
By: Moran Lerner
Tags: Robotics, Gaming, Internet of Things, Toys, Interaction Design

Here at Chirp, we take pride in understanding how our unique wireless data-over-sound technology should be best applied in the real world so that it delivers real benefit to our clients and their customers.

It is not always easy (or possible) to overcome every problem a client may have by using our technology. However, we are confident in the problems that it can solve and, as such, this week we have decided to take a deeper look at a particularly compelling use case in which we have quite significant experience in with several global clients: Interactive Toys.

Let’s look at some of the affordances of sound, and the way in which Chirp harnesses those affordances, that make this use case so compelling;

It is portable

Any device with a speaker can transmit a Chirp and most devices with a microphone can decode them.

Chirp’s suite of interoperable SDKs include iOS, Mac OS, Android, Windows, JS, Web Browsers, Python, Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Linux makes Chirp ideal for the wide array of platforms and chipsets used in toys. It also takes just minutes to implement a Chirp SDK into a product, making tight timescales that are common in the toy manufacturing process simpler through the ease of integrating Chirp technology.

Chirp can be embedded into any media such as radio, TV, streaming music services, websites, digital signage, console gaming, and even MP3s, vinyl records and CDs. Ultrasonic (inaudible) Chirps can be overlaid onto existing audio too in many circumstances — imagine a kids movie sending sonic commands to a toy which in turn responds with a gesture. But our unique set of in-house expertise makes Chirp the ideal partner for toy manufacturers as we understand how ultrasound and audible technology works, where, and how to implement it, making us trusted partners for the leading manufacturers globally.

Chirps can even be embedded into the cheapest speakers that may be found in a lo-fi McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy. Chirp has been proven and tested on the cheapest most basic speakers, right through to some of the most advanced systems.

It is broadcast capable

Chirp’s BB-8 interacting with multiple devices intuitively

Fuelled by excitement over the recent Star Wars film releases, the Chirp team decided to create a demo to showcase our technology’s broadcast capabilities. We programmed BB-8 to broadcast commands with a custom R2-D2 audio protocol, triggering responses from a group of devices. Watch closely to see some of the devices respond only to certain ‘Chirps’ and some respond to all ‘Chirps’, providing further opportunities for more personalised engaging interactions.

It enables Machine to Machine (M2M) interactions

Furthering the example of a toy responding to a sonic command from a movie, the same toy can then go on to Chirp another command to a second toy, and so on. Here, the team had some fun creating a sequence of M2M interactions to prove this out.

It works offline

The Official Skylanders Creator App

A solution that works offline was a key requirement of our client Activision Blizzard, who used Chirp to enable the sharing of characters from the video game in their most recent iteration of their $3bn Skylanders franchise, ‘Skylanders Imaginators’. This requirement was critical to provide comfort to the large number of parents who prefer not to connect their kid’s console to the internet for safety reasons. Fortunately, this ability is a key affordance of our technology and helped Activision to close the loop on their ‘Toys to Life’ strategy. When Chirp released their Skylanders project alongside Activision, they unintentionally gave users the power to send their characters to a mass audience via YouTube and other audio video sharing sites. The project brief was to transfer characters from TVs to laptops, tablets and smartphones using sound. Mission achieved. However, users quickly realised that sound was the mechanism for data transfer and they used Twitch and YouTube to send characters to anyone watching the game footage. We didn’t plan for that, but it plays into quite a unique strength of sound — it’s portable.

It is frictionless

Unlike many other networking technologies such as Wi-fi or Bluetooth, Chirp does not require devices to go through any prior handshake before they can exchange data. This not only makes on-boarding network capable devices onto a network a more seamless experience, as exemplified by our Wifi Login demo, but also provides the capability for more customers to simply ‘plug and play’ their toys (a benefit appreciated by parents around the world!)

With the interactive toys market on a solid growth path, the Chirp team are extremely excited at the new opportunities that our technology has provided, and continues to provide, to create thousands of unique experiences and engaging interactions between people and their toys.