Now parents like to buy toys for their children?
Educational toys!
For example, there are 85 years of history of building blocks toys, Lego.
There are also recent 3D books that are relatively hot.
At present, AR cards also have a place.
But are these cool enough? No!
These toys are far from satisfying the curiosity of today's bear children. So for this huge market demand, Merge, a company that makes VR+ toys, launched an app called “HoloCube†that literally means “hologram cubeâ€.
This product won the media acclaim, evaluation is centered on: unique, creative and other keywords.
Wired, a well-known American media, rated it as the hottest product in 2017.
Techradar rated it as the most unique product at CES
Distree EMEA also awarded it the 2017 New Product Award
So how unique is HoloCube?
The technical principle of this HoloCube is similar to the AR card. The AR card is to identify the card and overlay a virtual animation on the card.
And HoloCube is unique, open HoloCube App, can identify Merge's own cubes, cover the cube with virtual animation, showing different effects.
Click on the Apple mobile phone screen to achieve the effect of replacing the animation. With the cube's hand turning, the virtual cube moves.
For example: keep clicking on the squid eggs to hatch a cute squid baby, click on it and interact with you.
Content with teaching significance, 3D skull and 3D heart, and text descriptions on various parts.
Actually, Merge doesn't want you to use the phone directly to experience HoloCube. After all, their ultimate goal is to sell their own VR heads.
And, in conjunction with their homes, there will be no mobile phone screen that separates you from the virtual experience and will affect immersion. Bringing your head to the front, you can't see the screen border of the phone, hold the cube, and present the virtual animation on the cube as if it were mixed reality.
Note that Merge's VR head looks a bit different. See it?
The lid in front of the Merge VR head display does not completely cover the mobile phone. It exposes the camera of the mobile phone so that the actual scene can be captured and the virtual scene can be superimposed to achieve a mixed reality effect.
Then how to interact with the helmet? There is a button above the helmet, and you press the button to interact. And Merge also introduced a universal controller for mobile VR. I didn't use it, I don't know how, but it's always better than hand pressing VR.
Here, personally think that HoloCube is still very interesting, before seen a lot of AR toys, there are cards, deformed building blocks, these objects are basically an object corresponding to a virtual effect, or through a different arrangement of objects again Achieve different results.
For example, when a mobile phone is facing a card of the Sun Wukong, there appears a virtual image of the Sun Wukong, a Monkey King Card + a Pig Card. There is a Monkey King and a Pig, and there is also a scene where the Sun Wukong fights with the Pig.
However, the focus of HoloCube is to present different virtual scenes and virtual objects in a cube and achieve different effects through simple interaction. Cubes have more imagination than cards.
At the same time, combined with their own VR head display, can show mixed reality effects that other AR toys can not display, it has a gimmick and a sense of novelty, think that such a novel toy will surely attract curious bear children, but then?
Can such toys enable children to learn knowledge while playing?
Does your child’s vision have an impact?
Can children keep playing, or is it fresh?
Originally wanted to try the HoloCube App, but it hasn't been released yet. After that, the app supports IOS and Android platforms. It is unclear whether HoloCube will sell physical products like AR cards, and the App will give away for free. Or just sell the App, the physical cube is to publish the design, so parents print out and fold it out.
However, it favors the latter, after all, Merge's boss is software origin, and his resume does not involve offline retail.
Speaking of Merge CEO -Franklin Lyons, he is an old programmer and has been doing software development. Before founding Merge, Franklin Lyons was also starting a business, and the direction of entrepreneurship is education. He developed a children's educational mobile game, SpinFall, which the whole family can play. SpinFall was very successful at the time and ranked first in the Apple Store Education App. From 2010-2013, he spent a total of 3 years.
However, it has not been found yet.
Franklin Lyons founded Merge without SpinFall.
According to xconomy reports, Merge's new round of financing was a total of 10.1 million US dollars in the first half of 2016. In the past, Merge has also mobilized 3 million US dollars seed round funds.
Although the HoloCube App has not yet been released, Merge's VR headset has been sold in full channels. Working offline with 250 GameStop retail stores, online has long been on sale in Amazon. The price is now 56.55 US dollars.
There are 349 users participating in the scoring.
Among them, 12% have scored 1 point. Why?
Open the user's evaluation and found a generic problem with poor quality. When inserting a mobile phone and telescopically adjusting the VR head, Merge's plastic casing is easily broken. No wonder users are not satisfied.
Satisfied users, most of them expressed that their children like it, playing for hours to play, increasing the family's fun.
One of the users vomited only the purple head. The child was unhappy and wanted more colors. When the son plays himself, he still doesn't care about color. When he plays with friends, he is a little unhappy.
So say, different user groups are completely different, if you give a big purple VR head, you can't afford it. Still like black, gray and white.
Merge's products, whether it is VR Headset or HoloCube App, focus on teenagers. The author believes that VR/AR this new and exotic product, especially the mobile version of the head display, is currently positioned as a toy is a more pragmatic approach, since it is a toy, then from hardware to content, but also around the "toys" design, I think that Merge The company's approach is very focused.
In addition, young people are the groups most susceptible to novelty. Imagine 5-10 years later, VR/AR technology has truly become a new platform, and the C-end consumer has to depend on this group of people. Therefore, early enlightenment is very important. I value the current VR/AR products for teenagers and think it is very meaningful.
Of course, current Merge products are still in the exploratory phase. In addition to ideas and ideas that can be learned, there is not enough data to prove that their models are feasible.
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