Its name is Playmation and it is the new project by Disney and Hasbro together to give the kids a new way of playing and enjoying their favorite characters. How? With a kind of augmented reality mechanism!

Playmation kits will be composed of wearable toys, that will immerse the kids in missions occurring in the real world thanks to infrared technology, gestures recognition and radio frequencies. A voice will guide them towards the game goals as they are the true main characters and, as the mission will be completed, the little players will find themselves face to face with the enemy boss, fighting him as true super heroes thanks to the equipment, that will vibrate and make them feel they have superpowers.
The enemies will be little action figures to put on some special bases and they will interact in the game thanks to the equipment. The missions, Disney assures, will be all in the real life, so it will be a good method to end the bad habit of passing too many hours in front of a screen or playing with mobile devices.

Senior vice president of strategy and business development at Disney Consumer Products, Kareem Daniel said “We use digital technology to make active physical play more exciting for kids. Parents believe technology is becoming a natural part of kids’ lives, but at the same time most parents are nostalgic about how active they were when they played growing up. Kids love to play make-believe and become super heroes, and Playmation offers lots of different ways to play.”

The first announced kit, as we can read on Playmation official site, will be the one dedicated to Marvel’s Avengers, that will be out next fall. In 2016 it will be the turn of Star Wars, then in 2017 we’ll see the Frozen one.

The Avengers’ kit for now will have 25 missions, but surely it will be expanded thanks to the updating that technology and apps make possible.

Now that the article is ended, confess: how many adults are thinking of buying these kits for themselves? 😉

Who never tried View-Master? Maybe you don’t know its name, but surely, looking at the images of this article, something will come in your mind. Presented for the first time in 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York, this toy headset accompanied generations of children, surprising them with its 3D images. In the past, this seemed pure sci-fi; today, on the other hand, it’s like prehistory of technology, and in fact Google and Mattel created a partnership to modernize the toy viewer. How? With Augmented Reality, of course!

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The new View-Master will run on the Google Cardboard platform and will have special contents in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for children and families. The two companies, which gave in last days the news of the production of the new 3D stereoscope, said that the headset would work with any type of smartphone on any operating system.

Obviously, some changes have been made to the original device: the images disks are now “Experience Reels”, and they’re not inserted directly in the viewer but they just remain in front of the user. What is inserted in the headset is instead our smartphone, with which we’ll aim at the reels. The famous View-Master’s side button, that in the original device was used to roll the disks, now is used to choose the options that will appear in front of our eyes once we focus on the Experience Reel.

As you can see in the video below, this will immerse us in a unique, highly interactive experience.

View-Master will work also with all the other Google Cardboard apps, that you can download here.

Another surprise is the price: since View-Master is basically just a plastic phone holder, the device is only $29.99 (with one experience reel included); the Experience Reels will be sold in multiple packs for $15.

It seems that View-Master will be released next October.