The company introduces Osmo, an iPad suite of games for children which uses the iPad's camera to use physical tiles on a traditional tabletop as input. The demonstrated games include tangram, a tile based word guessing game, and a physics-engine based game in which players must draw a path for falling objects to hit targets.

While the product describes itself as using "reflective artificial intelligence, a groundbreaking technology that bridges the real and digital realms for unlimited possibilities of play", it falls under what we in academic HCI call "tangible interaction", following Shaer & Hornecker's definition:

"Interfaces that are concerned with providing tangible representations to digital information and controls, allowing users to quite literally grasp data with their
hand and effect functionality by physical manipulations of these representations." [0]

The four claims typically made when introducing tangible interfaces in products for children are usability benefits, learning benefits, collaboration benefits, and fun benefits [1]. Osmo does not escape to the rule, claiming all 4 in its marketing copy.

While Osmo does not include any information about research conducted with it that would demonstrate those claims, similar systems have been proposed in the past.

The word game is mirrored in Dekel & al's Spelling Bee [2], a game which uses wooden letter blocks instead of Osmo's Scrabble tiles, and LEDs embedded in the cubes to provide player feedback. The authors report high engagement from the test audience (children 7-12), but no learning assessment or long term engagement study was performed (arguably 2 of the most important metrics).

The tangram game is mirrored in past research projects, including Scarlatos & al's [3] tangram game. Xie & al's [4] paper performs a user study on 3 implementations of a puzzle game: physical, GUI based, tangible. The authors report finding same self-reported level of enjoyments from the test users on all 3. However, they report that repeat play was more significant in the physical & tangible version of the game, which does not create an argument in the favor of Osmo. They do report significant gender effects in the way of collaboration, which could be relevant for Osmo:

"While all gender pairings’ mean scores on the Interest and
Enjoyment subscale were nearly the same for the TUI
condition, the boy-boy pairs had significantly higher scores
than the girl-girl and girl-boy pairs for the GUI condition.
In addition, the girl-girl pair scores were significantly
higher for the traditional PUI condition than for either of
the computational conditions (GUI, TUI). For girl-girl pairs
mean scores for Perceived Competence subscale were also
higher for the PUI condition than for either of the GUI or
TUI conditions. Mean scores for boy-boy pairs were highest
for the GUI condition."

The last game implemented by Osmo, the physics game, is the least interesting of the 3 as it has less claims to educational value than the other 2. However, it is reminiscent of several similar tabletop based tangible systems and augmented reality systems. [5]

Unfortunately I have to go work now, and the edit window will be over when I'm back online :( But for readers who found the above interesting, I will leave a few more relevant papers [6][7][8][9]

[0] Shaer & Hornecker, "Tangible user interfaces: past, present, and future directions", 2010

[1] Zaman & al., "Editorial: the evolving field of tangible interaction for children: the challenge of empirical validation", Personal Ubiquitous Computing, 2012

[2] Dekel & al, "The Spelling Bee: An Augmented Physical Block System that Knows how to Spell", ACE, 2007

[3] Scarlatos & al, "TICLE: using multimedia multimodal guidance to enhance learning"

[4] Xie & al, " Are Tangibles More Fun? Comparing Children's Enjoyment and Engagement Using Physical, Graphical and Tangible User Interfaces ", TEI 2008

[5] Krzywinski & al, "RoboTable: A Tabletop Framework for Tangible Interaction
with Robots in a Mixed Reality"

[6] Antle & al, "Hands on What? Comparing Children’s Mouse-based and Tangible-based Interaction", IDC 2009

[7] Resnick & al, " Programmable Bricks: Toys to Think With", IBM Systems Journal, 1996

[8] Price & al, "Let's get physical: Learning Benefits of interacting in digitally augmented physical spaces" , 2004

[9] Resnick, "Edutainment? No thanks I prefer Playful Learning", 2004