LOS ANGELES — Walt Disney toys are sold around the world. Now, children can find them in the cloud as well.
The media giant is teaming up with toy company JAKKS Pacific and Patrick Soon-Shiong, Los Angeles’s wealthiest person, on a new line of toys — with a nifty technological twist designed to link the goodies that kids lug home from the store with Disney’s stable of well-known animated characters.
DreamPlay, developed by Soon-Shiong’s NantWorks company, and JAKKS work via an app that can be downloaded on Apple devices like the iPad, or smartphones and tablets running Google Android software. When a device’s camera is trained on any toy specifically designed to work with DreamPlay, it triggers one of thousands of preset animations that appear on the device’s screen and seem to be unfolding in the real world.
With viewers’ eyes locked on the tablet or smartphone screen, fairies appear to glide in and out of buildings, animated critters start playing musical instruments, mythical characters prance on a toy piano’s keyboard.
Disney, which licensed its characters to DreamPlay, and its partners hope that children will take to the new approach, which is intended to extend and expand the life of the toy. But it remains to be seen if the concept will prove to be more than a novelty, and be able to arrest a child’s short attention span.
In a showroom on the 20th floor of a Santa Monica, California, building, visitors to JAKKS’s demonstration are treated to an animated version of Sebastian, the red Jamaican crab from Disney’s Little Mermaid movie, who pops up onscreen on an iPad seconds after the tablet’s camera is trained on a real-life set of toy bongo drums.
The animated crab pounces on the drums and proceeds to bang out a calypso song onscreen, with both Sebastian and the physical drum set appearing together as if the two shared the same cartoon.
REAL, VIRTUAL INTERACTION
DreamPlay allows not just Sebastian, but also Tinker Bell and a host of other well-loved Disney characters to “interact” virtually with specially made toys via image-recognition software. The software was developed by Soon-Shiong, a former cancer surgeon who created drugs to fight diabetes and breast cancer and then sold the companies that produced them for $8.6 billion.
Soon-Shiong teamed with JAKKS, a $678-million-a-year toy maker and licensee of toys based on the Princess line of dolls, Marvel action figures and other Disney toys, among others.
The technology works via the “cloud”— images and video clips stored on remote servers that are streamed to kids’ mobiles when the app recognizes a particular item.
“It’s a tremendous way to combine great technology and Disney’s magical story telling to extend the time a child can play with a toy,” said Bob Chapek, president of Disney’s consumer products unit.
Since taking over in 2011, Chapek has repositioned Disney’s consumer product unit to expand its use of technology with its toys. DreamPlay is the first of what Chapek says are other products that will twin technology with familiar Disney toys, although he won’t name them.
Down the road, Disney may explore new business models, including selling subscriptions to content created specifically to be used with a particular toy, said Chapek.
The market is hardly certain for a product that requires a child to hold up a phone or tablet, and peer through it to play with a toy that’s stationary. Will children want to see Rapunzel endlessly dancing on the keys of a piano or Rosetta, a fairy from Disney’s Tinker Bell movies, fly in and out of a cottage?
“It brings added value to a toy, and kids will love it,” said Lars Gjoerup, joint group managing director of Top-Toy, a large toy retailer in the Nordic region. “The toy will create an emotional attachment.”
