Hey everybody if Lon Seidman, I'm in New York City at the Jacob Javits Center because we're going to go into Toy Fair
2018 I've never been to one of these before and our
Objective here is to look for some tech stuff that is maybe geared to kids but perhaps
Maybe to adults as well because it's like fun entertainment toys as well
So we're going to be walking around here with that in mind and maybe make an exception for Star Wars when we get over to
That booth so it's head on in and see what we can find here at Toy Fair
2018 for cool tech gadgets all right so we are at a booth called backyard brains
And I'm about to be attached electrically
to this young lady here Helen and
Yeah, right, and then
So what we have here is a kits a bio amplifier is taking the electricity the small amount of lectricity
It's in the in the neurons in her spinal cords. They're coming out to her muscles
And when you squeeze your hand you're starting to see this right here, so this is these are called acts potentials
And they're coming from her brain to her arms and now what we want to do is
Because we can see it on the screen here
We can then put it into a computer
And we're gonna send it into your arm such that when her brain sends a command to her arm
Your arm is gonna move, so you're gonna make a copy and then in a control C control V
And you'll you're gonna lose your freewill and we're gonna pass it over to Helen oh
Okay
And I hope to survive this so I've got these sensors here on my arm
And he's going to attach me up to this now what am I being hooked up to?
This is the this is a little electrical circuit here
That's going to be able to connect be what we're seeing on the screen which is called here electromyogram
I'm gonna place the electrodes here, which allows so if you know electricity likes to flow with you metal
So we're gonna go from one metal source into some saltwater here into your arm, and so you make a bio interface
So I'm gonna plug you two together
And what I do you guys will become one
cybernetic organism
Alright, you guys. Are you guys are one so I'm gonna
This is a little amplifier
So I'm gonna turn off slow so when you want you I want you to go ahead and squeeze your hand like I kind of
Bring it up with your revving a motorcycle like that and just do it every once in a while and you're gonna
Feel something here and do it again
So my this is crazy, okay?
Yeah, oh, okay, so yep sure sure
You can control his hands, so just whatever you want to and you can look away
So so you don't look and then and you have full control over it
So
This is legit
Can I do it back to her now is that okay?
If you let your hand be completely relaxed like you let it be dead
I want to feel the weight like about like you all right there
It is so now what I can do if I moved her hand would it move your hand
Could I take my freewill away from Helen to remove I would say no because her brain's not yeah
So I do it all I want it doesn't matter, but if she does it okay?
Yeah
Okay
Her hand have to move if I stopped your hand from moving
Yeah, just just much so so try to move your hand really just move hard
It does it again even though
It's called isometric contraction her brain is still sending that command which is getting copied so even her hand doesn't move your hand move so
I'm gonna unhook you now, but so what we do is we take.. I'm a neuroscientist
And we started this company about nine years ago
And what we do is take
Tools that we use in the research lab
but make it available for the 99% we want everyone to participate in the discovery of
neuroscience and we're doing that by it sort of like
Democratizing the tools that neuroscientists use and so everything you'll see presented by back-air brains and stuff that we use in the research lab
But now kind of design for kind of kids, and and the general public just kind of experiment with the brain very cool
And it and it works, and I don't think I have any brain damage, right
nothing serious, but exactly
How much does all this stuff cost yeah, so we our price range around 150 to 200 bucks so this is where?
But if you would at a research university this equipment cost forty to eighty thousand dollars
So this is quite a significant difference so we got funded by the the National Institute of Mental Health
To come up with a curriculum, so we have over thirty experiments everything from the human stuff
We work with invertebrates
So like cockroaches and worms because we can record from their brains pretty easily and most recently we're recording from the brains of plants
So that's a bit of a lie plants don't have brains, but they do have action potentials just like we do so
So you can find our stuff? We've given four TED talks on the main stage and so
We have a new TV show coming out in March where we do each episode is about some DIY
neuroscience stuff that we're working on so
Anyway, I hope you hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for stopping by randomly
Thank you
The one thing I've been looking to check out over the last couple of years is little bits
And what these are are little electronic learning toys that you snap together?
And what's cool about these is that you can't mess it up and burn the house down because you can only connect them
The right way, there's a magnet on here that will repel the little bits here, so I don't have my friend
Just build us a little circuit here to show you how this works, so these are ways to learn electronics
We're going to put a dimmer switch on here, and we can control that LED light with the dimmer switch
And they have all these different projects that you can do now what attracted me to the booth today. Is this r2d2 over here and
Antonio is gonna follow me around here now
This is a robot r2d2 robot incidentally that you build yourself
And you can control
Him or her depending on how you want to define it with this remote control here on this app
Which is really neat now what they have done here is created multiple missions for the robots so right now
It's configured to move forward and backwards
But they also have missions where you can have its head move for example or maybe extend out an arm
And you have to rebuild the robot every time
to get those different functions to work so the kids really have to think about how to connect these pieces together how to get the
Motors to work the right way and really you know work hard to figure out how to make this robot work
And then they have to take it apart and put it back together again to do some different things
They've added coding now to this so the app will allow you to
Actually make a program for the robot to follow after you build the robot you can see an example perhaps
Hopefully the reflection isn't too bad there Antonio of how something would work here so in this instance. He's going to start move forward
He's gonna wait one second stop and play a sound and of course
There's a lot of other stuff you can do in different branching things that you can work into the mix
This is $99 about a $100
Which isn't bad actually I think for the amount of time a kid might spend on it
And they were showing us some other stuff here these they say are there new lowest cost devices
they've produced and these are kind of like little appliances that kids can build so this is a
Nightlight very similar to what we just saw at the outset here
So you have an LED nightlight that you can build here for this little thing
this is a
Bubble bot and what you do is build this little circuit out here you put this in some bubble soap and it will blow bubbles
For you. This is a little walking thing. These are all paper by the way
This is a little walking
Contraption that you can build to have this little thing slink across the table if you want and this is a game
Where you try to get this robotic arm to push a ball through a hole?
And they have to decorate these little things and get everything put together and these cost $39
But they're all compatible
With each other so you could take components out of this and put it into the robot or vice versa
so once you get a couple of these kits kind of like Legos maybe build different circuits and
Have some fun with it really cool stuff love to try some of these things out in the coming months
So here's something that I saw a couple of years ago at CES. That's expanded a bit
This is called stick ba and last time I saw it
It was mostly this and what they give you is a little tripod for your phone and some figures that you can
Maneuver into some stop-motion animation and the app actually helps you make those stop-motion animations
and they have come up with some new things in the line that I thought were just
Interesting for kids to play around with they've got these little sets here these are cardboard
But you can have like a little farm here with a scene that you can set up
They've got a pirate ship, and now they've got a space bridge of a spaceship kind of thing as well
So you can get some scenes that are ready, built for your stick bots to make some more stop-motion animations
and I just like the
The inclusiveness here that you get the tripod the app is designed to do the stop-motion thing kind of an all-in-one
Out-of-the-box experience that isn't all that expen, so here's a little thing you might have seen before
But they got some new ones coming out these are called the tiny arcades
and they sell for about 20 to 25 bucks apiece depending on which game you're getting and they
Launched with some very familiar games like Galaxian space invaders pac-man and miss pac-man
But they've got some new ones coming out here namely Dig Dug, and we'll turn it back on here
Frogger and Galaga
And they are very tiny little screens and things a little hard to control initially I get they get used to them
But what's cool as they are emulating the arcade game, so you're getting the exact arcade experience, and they also replicated the entire
Cabinet of the original arcade including the artwork and even the little marquee lights up on them all so these are really cool little
Stocking stuffers for middle-aged gamers like myself so if you are
Looking to get a gift for the upcoming holiday season you can start shopping now
These are really kind of fun
And they are the original game just in a very small form-factor so gamers of a certain age like me
Remember these little things from Mattel electronics, and the world's smallest
Which is the company here makes tiny versions of these just like those arcade cabinets
And I'll switch on this football one here real quick and you can hear the sound here
so this is while it was it was just this little game with these little lights that would light up to represent a
Football game and we used to spend hours playing with these things because this is all we had for portable gaming in the 80s
So just be grateful
you've got your your switch and all the other stuff out there because you could have been playing with this had things not evolved but
Really cool nostalgia for those of us that remember playing these games
They're little versions of a game that we all played quite a bit as kids so us children of the 80s
I'm getting a nostalgic here at Toy Fair might remember Teddy Ruxpin well. He's back
This time he's got moveable eyes
He's got a screen inside the eyes there and of course he's talking and of course because we are in the 21st century now
There's an app that goes with Teddy Ruxpin that you can read along with or not if you want
But it was kind of funny to see Teddy Ruxpin making an appearance again. He sells for
$99 and he comes with a bunch of stories now, they're selling additional stories as in-app purchases now for you as well
And they have some of these other smaller versions here that don't animate but
Use some of the IP from the original Teddy Ruxpin days including his little partner here
And back in the old days this little guy would plug into Teddy Ruxpin, and they'd interact with each other
they're not doing that just yet, but
Pretty cool stuff to see the 80s making their way back into the 21st century
So we're taking a look at the ozobot
and this is something that has a good amount of depth to it actually so this is a little robot and it's
Programmable, and there are two ways to program it right now. He's this kind of running around on his own
They have a thing where you can draw lines on a piece of paper like you can see here
And the ozobot is going to follow the path and then in these little squares here you can color different
combinations of colors
And as he runs over that it will make him do different things you can see when he goes across this block here
He's going to turn around and do a little 360 motion there and continue onward because that pattern of colors
Is the command to have him do that and then when you're ready you get into more advanced stuff
They've got an app that attaches to it and you can do a lot of coding here as well
You can see how complex some of this stuff can get he's got a lot of sensors on him. He's got proximity sensors
He also has the ability of course to see optically on this track here
So there's a lot that you can do as your kid gets better at this coding activity here
And it really looks pretty cool. It sells for 90 bucks
There's an online component so your kids can share their programs with their friends
And there's a leveling up process to
You know to kind of show off what you've been able to do by unlocking more commands and whatnot again a lot to this one
The ozobot so we found this little guy at the ub tech booth
I love Star Wars so anything Star Wars often catches my eye. This is a little stormtrooper. They're about $299
So they'll a little more expensive than some of the other stuff. We've looked at but they're pretty cool
They've got some augmented reality things you can do with them
You can also go on patrol, and he's got a facial recognition feature built in so if he sees you walking around the hallway
He'll leave you alone
But if it's something or someone he doesn't recognize. He'll stop and give an alert and interrogate them. He can also say things so they
They say a couple of words and phrases and whatnot some pretty cool little device here
He's a little cute stormtrooper that can patrol your house
So here's something really cool that we found this is called squishy circuits and Antonio is going to pan the camera down here
These this colored play-doh essentially is
Conductive so when I take this little thing here and put it inside the play-doh the light lights up the white stuff here is an
Insulator so it separates those two sides there and were able to complete a loop here and get this going now. It's cool
Though is they've got a circuit inside of this battery pack here. It's got four double A batteries
If I short it out
it won't heat up the batteries the light just kind of goes out here as you can see so it's a full you know a
pretty foolproof in the sense that the kids won't start any fires or anything and they can learn a little bit about
electricity they've got some other things here like a fan that I can plug in here so we can just grab it like so and
Give it a little kick start there, and we've got a fan now rolling off of this
And they have a couple of different kits here
They've got on the table, so you can see different colored lights and everything prices range from about ten dollars to sixty dollars
So you can get different kits and combine things if you want or whatever you want to do pretty cool stuff now
I always know I'm gonna find some cool stuff in the startup areas of these shows
And we've been finding a lot of neat things here. This is something that I was hearing about that
I haven't seen in person yet. This is the piper computer kit and what you start with is
This box of parts which includes a Raspberry Pi one of my favorite little mini computers
And you build effectively a science kit or a learning kit for yourself to get a screen attached here
And eventually you get this what you see here after you put everything together and right now
We're in this little Minecraft thing that they've got they've got a custom version of Minecraft that
Basically has you wire up all these buttons here to the GPIO ports on the Raspberry Pi
So you do all this building, and then you add things that you can do inside of the game here
so if you're into Minecraft
And you want your kids to learn how to program and do some electronics you can start there
And then as part of the deal here they also have a coding
Component and what they're doing here is showing us. There's a program running here
that's turning the
Pin number 22 on the Raspberry Pi on waiting for a second essentially and then turning it off and repeating and what they have done
Here is not only coded this and have to basically have the kid coded
I guess but they also have a breadboard here that you're wiring up to the Raspberry Pi to
Have this action take place?
So they're learning some basic electronics and some basic coding here with a computer that they assembled themselves
so there are only a couple of videos on my channel that have done more than a million views and one of them was the
Power-up which is a little thing that you can put on top of a paper airplane to?
Basically turn it into a little drone
You can control the paper airplane from your phone, and they have a couple different versions
This is the one we looked at they also have a more advanced one with an onboard camera here
This is called the power up x
Fpv and they have a new one out here, that's going to be a lot of fun
This is the power up dart
And you can see it's got these little landing wheels on it because it can take off and land on its own
So you don't have to throw it first has a more powerful motor it does
acrobatics and a whole bunch of other stuff as well, so it's gonna be kind of fun to play with this they've
Dramatically improved the app that they have so there's a lot more tutorials both on how to fly
but also how to fold up these paper airplanes in the first place because
You do have to make the paper airplane that you're going to fly the product is essentially the electronics portion that you see here
so we're try to get this one in because this is a fun little thing that I think can really teach a little bit about
Avionics while having some fun flying around a paper airplane with your phone, so this is called the Augie
And this is another device that you can learn to code with and have it achieve tasks and right now my friend here is
Setting up this augmented reality path
using coding here
They're dropping these different movements into this and the objective here is for Augie to capture that donut over there
So they have to get all these things in the right order drag them over there
and then execute the command and Augie will an
Augmented reality drive over to the donut and eat it and once you achieve that objective
You go on to more and more complex things and eventually the kid can just do a free play thing where they can build little
environments on the floor and have these little code snippets to control the Augie around the house Augie is available for
$199 and you can get him now
So that is going to do it for this first and only dispatch from Toy Fair
We walked around the entire show it's a big show, but not as big as CES
So we could get it all done in a day, and we found all the stuff that was kind of relevant
I think for this channel
There's a lot more to see here that isn't mostly toys of course and to some degree
I think it's probably a sign that parents are looking for non screen activities for their kids
So there's a lot of hands-on things a lot of mechanical things in that learning category that we saw
But not so much on the techie side of things
But the things that we did see we're all about teaching kids
Programming skills and working through all of the concepts that they need to learn to solve problems with code
And it was kind of neat to see a lot of that here, and you saw some of that as well
I think by far the coolest thing we saw was that thing that they hooked up to my arm
And that woman was actually controlling my arm with her hand that was kind of crazy, and that was a neat learning tool, too
so
Definitely check that one out if you can they've got a bunch of other
products in that line including the ability to read
Plants and all this other stuff so any but it's been a great show we're going to
See what we got here on footage
I think we're going to have a longer dispatch
And I anticipated which is good for you all and let me know what you thought of this visit to Toy Fair
2018 this is lion Simon, thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn TV supporters including
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