Mattel introduced its first Barbie doll way back in 1959, and she’s found herself at the center of cultural controversy ever since. To her credit, she keeps adapting to the times. Today she is actually several Barbies, a gang of dolls more diverse and less infuriating in terms of body proportions. And she’s enjoyed an enviable career path, with stints as , a , of the United States, and , among other things. Now, at age 58, Barbie is a hologram. And I don’t mean one of Jem’s backup singers.
Hello Barbie Hologram is a small box containing an animated projection of Barbie that responds to voice commands. It combines motion-capture animation with Amazon Echo-style voice interactions, and it arrives in stores later this year.
So how does it work? A screen in the top of the box projects an image of Barbie onto a translucent wedge, which reflects it so she appears to float in mid-air. The toy uses a 2-D projection of a 3-D animation, which limits what you see. You can’t view Barbie in three dimensions from the side, for example, and if you peer through the box from the back, you don’t see her at all.
The wake phrase “Hello Barbie” brings the tiny sprite to life. You can ask Barbie to change her appearance, switch outfits, set an alarm, act as a nightlight, or get down with her bad self while you bump Run the Jewels 3. Can you choreograph her dance routines? Of course. Can you add things to your calendar? Yup. If you ask Barbie the weather when it’s raining, do holographic cats and dogs fall from the sky? Yes.
That web-connected mic raises the same privacy concerns as the Amazon Echo. But Mattel insists that, unlike the Echo and Google Home, Barbie doesn’t save recordings to its servers. And the holo-box uses 256-bit encryption to shuttle voice queries to the cloud in a system designed to meet Federal Trade Commission’s requirements outlined in the . That means letting parents or guardians see all the data the system collects. Mattel expects official COPPA certification by the time the toy ships in late summer.
PullString developed the underlying “multimedia chatbot” tech. The same folks also built the voice-control features for the cool . Hopefully, this holographic assistant won’t experience the same problems. plagued the mini-mansion during the holidays, and the toy greeted many kids with a mysterious “Error Code 18” message whenever they asked it to do something.
The only prototype of the Hello Barbie Hologram appears in Mattel’s booth at the American International Toy Fair in New York, but it’s merely a representation of the toy’s size, holographic display, and animation. It doesn’t have voice-control features activated, so Mattel showed a big-screen canned demo of how holo-Barbie will respond to spoken commands.
Source: So, Barbie’s a Hologram Now. Oh, and She Responds to Your Voice – Wellston Journal