TOY R&D
Caleb Chung, the 42-year-old creator of Furby, is a modern Geppetto, a craftsman determined to bring toys to life. So in February, Chung raised the curtain on his own R&D workshop - a start-up called TOY, launched with Susannah Rosenthal, who once ran the Advanced Products Group at Mattel, and Stuart Imai, former design director for Wham-O. TOY aims to use embedded technology to create the illusion of life - and to do so affordably.
"How do you take advantage of a $3 million robotic arm when your hard costs are limited to $5?" asks Chung, who faced similar challenges working on Furby and projects like Microsoft's Barney and Nickelodeon's Zog Logs Playsets. The solution, he says, is low-cost motors, batteries, and sensor technologies.
Bret Hadley, the president of Wham-O and a potential client, agrees. In an industry built on products that retail for less than $20, says Hadley, "TOY is redefining what's possible. Most industries engage in basic research into new technologies, but no one has done that in the toy business."
TOY's first product, slated to debut next year, is a patented mechanism that will enable a single motor to simultaneously drive dozens of independent functions - rolling eyes, perking ears, and reaching arms, for example. At less than a dollar, "it's like breaking the laws of physics," Chung says.
Chung - who spent years as a comic and mime and played an orangutan in 120 episodes of Dumbo's Flying Circus - is the first to admit that the tech doesn't make the toy: "It boils down to the human interface. We attribute intelligence to the nonverbal cues that make up 80 percent of our communications - the physical animation. When a toy mimics these cues, the technology wears a human face."
Or a furry one.
Case in point: Furby. Inspired by watching hamsters roam a bathroom floor, the famed animatron is capable of hundreds of expressions: It talks, lets out a serendipitous raspberry, and, when caught red-handed, flattens its ears. The range of responses has inspired fears that the toy might be used to record classified information, much less teach kids foul language - myths Chung delights in.
In the future, Chung says, there will be all sorts of artificial creatures that serve as both toys and tools - like an animatronic turtle that wanders around the yard and cuts the grass. "The key," the TOY founder says, "is autonomy, not interactivity. When you can create autonomy, you're done. It's like a magic trick."
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