Big Bird is bringing AR technology to children through the latest smartphone innovations.
Preschoolers are going to have another reason to want to use their parents’ smartphones, as Sesame Workshop has started working with Qualcomm in order to provide an augmented reality experience.
The popular Big Bird character took the stage at the most recent Consumer Electronics Show.
He was in the spotlight at the event in order to announce the Sesame Street augmented reality app. It is called “Big Bird’s Words” and it allows children to use their parents’ smartphones in order to take a different view at the world around them. By finding printed words in the real world, the child can aim the smartphone and listen to Big Bird as he assists in sounding out its first letter.
For example, the augmented reality app would sound out the “M” from the word “Milk”.
Should the device be aimed at that word while the augmented reality application is active, then the Big Bird voice would say “You found the word Milk! It starts with the letter M.”
Dave Glauber, from the Sesame Workshop Content Lab explained that “We know that kids are entering kindergarten with a vocabulary gap.” This was said during his keynote, at which time the augmented reality app was actually unveiled by Qualcomm. He then went on to state that “With this app we can introduce kids to words wherever they are and give them an understanding of what those words mean.”
The Big Bird’s Words augmented reality app isn’t yet available for sale, but it is expected to be released to the public at some point during the summer of 2013. It is intended to be the first of two apps that will be developed as a result of the partnership between Sesame Street and Qualcomm. The other application, which won’t be out until after the first one’s release, will be entitled “Abby’s Fairy Rock”.
This was the first time that the CES event was opened by a mobile company, representing a milestone in that industry as well as for augmented reality, which was the primary topic.
