Family fun long distance with this crazy looking gadget
Last year at its big hardware event, Amazon took the covers off of the Amazon Glow: a video chat and projector system designed to let kids play and learn with grandparents, and other far-away relatives and friends.
Initially available on limited release, it’s now available to all Stateside, for $299.
While an Amazon Glow looks like it slots right into the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, this is not an Alexa product. It is instead much more closely linked to Amazon’s $2.99-a-month Kids+ subscription, which offers lots of child-friendly content for Amazon Fire tablet owners.
The Amazon Glow initially seems to have little in common with a tablet, though. It’s an upright tower with a phone-like 8-inch screen, used for the video chat part of the experience.
A downward firing LED projector sits in the block towards the Amazon Glow’s top, casting a 19-inch image onto the surface on which the Glow sits.
The package includes a white silicone mat, because projecting only a wooden table would result in a barely visible image.
This projected image also becomes a touch-sensitive play area. Amazon hasn’t released all the technical data behind the Glow yet, but this touch operation most likely relies on a camera that sits next to the projector, pointing downwards, rather than any special tech inside the mat itself.
The child can then treat the silicone mat like a touchscreen, interacting with puzzles, digital drawing canvases and story books.
And at this point, the person on the other end gets to see both a representation of the app the child sees and a view of the their face, using picture-in-picture.
This is quite an ambitious and unusual gadget, but Amazon’s long-standing Kids+ subscription means there is already plenty of content for it to feed off.
Amazon says the service now has thousands of children’s books, there’s a painting app and games include Chess, Checkers, Go Fish, Memory Match, ABC Charades and Paddle Battle.
Characters from Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, Frozen and Toy Story all feature in the Kids+ library. It’s all certified kid-friendly stuff.
Amazon Glow’s augmented reality side
There’s also new content specific to Amazon Glow. The Object Scanning feature lets a child “scan” a toy or other item and make it into a jigsaw they smash and then re-construct.
Glow also sees the start of the Glow Bits augmented reality range.
Puzzle pieces bear marks the Amazon Glow can recognize, weaving those physical pieces into Kids+ apps and games. Tangram Bits is bundled, a new take on a classic puzzle where smaller objects of different shapes and sizes have to be put together to form, say, a square.
A few figurative puzzle pieces of the underlying tech haven’t been revealed yet, like the resolution of the projector and screen.
