It is a couple of years since the first Skylanders game arrived that blended physical character collectibles with on screen action. I first got interested in it from the vector it was plotting with being able to potentially create new physical toy changes with 3d printing and it also led to showing this advance in technology and games on the TV in series 3 of Cool Stuff Collective. This also made it’s way into my academic paper 🙂
Disney have now picked up on the technology with Disney Infinity. The official trailer shows a lot of game play with a few references to it’s version of the portal of power and the range of figures.
There is a lot more though from Family Gamer TV on youtube
Here Andy @GeekDadGamer Robertson has got some great interviews and exclusives. We have both talked about Skylanders and alike in various ways including sharing a podcast on the subject 🙂
Of course as with many technologies getting a physcial object of some sort to be part of the game play is not brand new. The usual Gartner adoption curve applies. Someone invents something, it generally will fail first time until everything else catches up, new variants on other tech evolve and become accessible and social changes occur. One of the early ones that you may remember was R.O.B. also toys that interacted with TV that were before their time such as Captain Power
This blending is occurring more than ever, not just character collectible toys but apps on our second screens even Antiques Roadshow has got in on the act. The way we interact with content is changing drastically. Will everyone be able to keep up? Lets see 🙂
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