Tech or Toy?
The infusion of high tech and video games into the traditional toy market is changing the way we need to develop children’s toys

Connected toys, toys-to-life, smart toys: call them what you will, but it’s clear that tech and toys are rapidly converging. Years before the Internet of Things (IoT) explosion, major toy companies had already begun experimenting with ways to marry toys and tech to stay relevant within their key demographics. The onset of the digital age in the 2000’s and early 2010’s brought products like game consoles and smartphones, which made serious inroads to American living rooms. Toy manufacturers became quickly aware that they needed to find ways to adapt their traditional brands to accommodate the emerging styles of play. More importantly, they needed to determine the best ways to leverage tech and gaming in order to create a competitive toy experience for 21st century kids.
However, established toy makers have not traditionally invested in cutting-edge tech or the complex hardware and software consumers now expect, often fearing high development costs. Hence, the early “evolution” of connected toys has been driven by toy industry newcomers: tech start-ups.
Toys like Spero’s BB-8, and Anki’s Cozmo and Overdrive are just a few examples of start-up developed products that have risen to the top of the (toy)pile. But is tech experience alone the magic formula that’s giving these startups success with connected toys?
No
The key advantage these companies have is actually their approach to design.

The industry is discovering that both toys and tech have styles of play with specific advantages and disadvantages. Hence, the trick to combining a toy and a game or a piece of tech is understanding which features are complementary. That brand new voice translation software everyone is talking about may be a fantastic piece of tech, but does adding it to a toy car actually improve the play experience? Too many “tech toys” are designed with the expectation that the tech alone will sell the toy. This results in products that look promising at first glance but are ultimately gimmicky and have little lasting power.
Successful toy startups have avoided the ugly tech-toy-frankenstein issue by putting the idea of “features” at the heart of their design process. Similar to the traditional software or hardware design process, these connected toy companies use their technical knowledge to break-down toys and tech into a list of basic features. Only then does design begin, and features from both the toy and tech are used as building blocks to create a product that is equal parts toy and tech.
Obviously technical knowledge comes in handy when picking and coupling features in the design phase, but it’s the ability to quickly figure out which features are complementary that enables these tech companies to create transformative play experiences.
What designers and toy companies should focus on is finding the fun during this process of feature assembly and ask themselves: how can I leverage new tech to improve long-proven patterns of play?
For demonstration purposes let’s examine a couple products and see how they were able to combine toy and tech in a meaningful way.
Not Your Dad’s Slotcars
When Anki re-imagined the the classic Slot car track with Overdrive, they ditched the traditional electrified “slots” in favor of AI driven cars that could be controlled via a smart device. Other features such as weapons, battles, and boosts were heavily influenced by proven design success in the video game industry. The result was a toy that resembled a traditional slot car track, but with eerily intelligent vehicles.

Anki’s careful blend of the two mediums is the root of Overdrive’s success. Overdrive, much like the original slot cars, keeps it simple in terms of controls. However, by carefully sprinkling additional gameplay features via the app, Anki creates refreshing gameplay that still has the classic core mechanics of slot car racing at it’s heart.
Innovating in RC
As of 2005 RC toys were a very well developed sector. It would have been hard to imagine in the early 2000’s that there could be any additional groundbreaking developments. Yet, the popular Sphero toy did just that.
Sphero was one of the first brands to realize that the modern day teen already had a remote control that they carried with them at all times: their phone. By moving the control system for their remote-control ball, Sphero, to app-controlled Bluetooth, Sphero brought the world of apps to toys.This change allowed for a critical innovation: manufacturers could now push updates for their toys post-purchase. Chaining the toy to an app allowed Sphero to send firmware and software updates to the toy at any time. Adjustments to steering algorithms could be issued without a recall, and new games and play patterns could be added via the app without requiring the purchase of additional add-ons.
This idea of post-launch updates is a software feature that has been around since the early days of computers, but it’s addition to the world of toys changes the fundamental pattern of design and release.

The other major upside of using the phone as a controller is the ability to leverage the computing power of the device. By offloading the toy’s brains to a far more advanced external device, Sphero was able to create space for more advanced mechanisms and control systems in it’s toy. This resulted in the first reliably controllable sphere — a goal that would have been pricey to achieve using a traditional RC controller.
As demonstrated in both Overdrive and Sphero the power of connecting toys to mobile phones signifies the next jump forward in feature innovation. The advanced computing of the phone unshackles many classic design constraints enabling big tech ideas like AI, automation, and computer vision, to radically change the capabilities of our toys.
In order to find that toy-tech sweet spot, it’s important that both hardware and software be designed with equal emphasis on quality. A connected app experience that serves as little more than a joystick is a missed opportunity, because it doesn’t add to the play experience. Great connected toys are born through careful examination of where there is room for improvement and developing innovative ways to merge two forms of play.
To compete with the success of startups, traditional toy brands need to develop with the goal of reinventing and fundamentally changing the way consumers interact with their toys. While tech expertise is a clear necessity, the process by which connected toys are designed and developed is even more important. At Dash Robotics, we have a platform that enables brands without connected toy experience to transform their existing toy lines with exciting new features. Our own projects such as Kamigami Robots are just the first examples of what’s possible when you design with strong technical foundations. We look forward to helping spread the new paradigm of connected toy design across the broader toy industry. If you want to learn more, don’t hesitate to reach out to our CEO, Nick Kohut, at nick@dashrobotics.com.
Connected toys are not merely an update. They are the future of play.
