Tangible Play's Osmo, iPad Help Turn the World into One Big Game

The world is not a game. That's a statement a lot of us come to realize fairly early on in life, but for the first while, anyway, the world might well look like one. Imaginative play is important to foster in the life of a child, as it builds reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking skills that will serve a child well later in life. Tangible Play, meanwhile, helps offer a little extra help on that front as its new surprisingly simple hardware known as the Osmo device, backed up by a standard iPad, helps turn the world into what we'd long known it's not: one big game.

Osmo got its start from one of the strangest origin stories in quite some time: a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign. It didn't turn to Indiegogo or Kickstarter like many other projects did; instead, it set up its own, complete with a website that actually showed the Osmo system being assembled, and how it operated in turn.

The concept is almost staggeringly simple, yet at the same time, more elegant than might be realized at first blush. The Osmo system slides over the iPad's front-facing camera, where a combination of a built-in mirror and a system known as Reflective Artificial Intelligence kicks in. From there, a series of games can be played, including a tangram puzzle—in which a series of shapes are fit together, jigsaw-puzzle-style, into one larger shape—and a game called Words,in which users spell a word based on a picture presented on screen, with two sides able to compete. But the centerpiece of this whole thing might be Newton, a physics game which allows users to use real-world objects to drop a series of balls on-screen and channel said balls into a set of target zones around the field of play. The crew behind Osmo has, at last report, “at least 50” ideas for other games that could be built around the Osmo hardware.

The Osmo system is currently available for pre-order, offering up a set of tangram shapes and letter tiles for Words as well as the base to play Newton all for $50. The price will double when it goes to full retail, which is expected to be later this year, and the pre-order appears to run until June 22.

Basically, what the Osmo looks to do is introduce real-world gaming and play elements to kids who are increasingly getting a start with play on electronic devices. Where kids of 10 to 30 years ago might have begun with Lego, the kids of today are starting on Minecraft. A table stacked with jigsaw puzzles might now be replaced by a simple iPad app that will even go so far as to automatically create puzzles out of a photograph, a project that's much more difficult and expensive in real-time.  Admittedly, some might find this sad, but is it really so much different from a room-filling library replaced with an e-reader? Does Winnie the Pooh stop being Winnie the Pooh when he's on an LCD display?

Philosophy aside, Osmo is likely to be a pretty big hit, and not just with children, either. Schools—particularly those in the kindergarten to about third grade range—should be enamored with this as well, and educational fun for all looks like it will fairly abound here. This clever mix of real-world play and electronic gaming should go over well and teach plenty of lessons in the process.