WINNIPEG – A virtual koi pond snags attention at the entrance to Google Tokyo’s office.
A motion-activated display brightens a storefront in Peru.
The sure-fire attention-grabbers originate in an office in Winnipeg.
“We’re currently world leaders in interactive projection environment software, so if you go to an airport and you see an interactive floor there, chances are pretty good it’s one of ours,” says Meghan Athavle, one of the creators.
“We’ve done product-launch installations for Samsung, Nescafé, we just did a Coca-Cola plant opening in Capetown, South Africa.”
Athavle and the rest of the team at Po-Mo Inc. are turning heads around the world with their interactive creations. The reaction is practically universal — people are instantly hooked.
“Especially kids, because they have no inhibition, so they will just play with it, they think it’s the best thing ever,” says programmer Curtis Wachs. “For younger kids, they’ll sit there and wave their hands over it and it’ll just explode underneath them.”
That reaction ultimately sparked a new idea.
For the past year, Po-Mo has been developing a way to bring this interactive technology from a retail space into a child’s room. Lumo, as they’re calling the new toy, would essentially hook up to a ceiling light and beam motion-activated games onto the floor.
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Wachs has spent years honing his skills as a programmer through trial and error, working 12- to 15-hour days to get the toy just right.
“Some people like to watch TV or whatever. I like to build things, so this is fun to me,” he said.
Every detail of the games, from the software programming to the creative design, is created off by Po-Mo’s in-house team.
Now the team is working to get the LUMO prototype to the next stage — bringing it up to code and shrinking it down in size.
“You have to have it certified and you need to make sure it’s not going to burn people’s houses down and that it can be manufactured at a reasonable cost, so we need to engage engineers who that’s their specialty,” Athavle said.
Po-Mo recently joined Kickstarter to raise investment capital in order to get Lumo into mass production.
They’re ready to spread the word about the toy, but they’ve intentionally kept it under wraps until now. Winnipeg’s location off the beaten path has helped them do that.
“There’s an expression when you have a startup: It’s called being under the radar. In some ways, we’ve leveraged our location to keep us under the radar so we’re able to take this toy to market. No one’s ever seen it before, no one’s ever done it. We have the patent on it and yet we had three years to work on it,” Meghan said.
Po-Mo’s goal is to get Lumo on the market by fall 2015.
By then, Po-Mo hopes to have added other features to the toy, such as making it customizable so kids can tailor the games to their personal interests by adding themes and different characters.
“We’ve already created a bunch of content tools for our existing software on our website, where people can upload pictures, move some sliders around and bam, download it,” Wachs said. “You don’t have to have programming knowledge, you just need to know how to upload a graphic or draw a picture.”
Lumo could also have other applications that will appeal to some parents. Theoretically, the toy could measure how physically active the user is and how many calories a child has burned.
“Or if they want, they can set parental controls on their toy so that it scans their room to see if it’s clean before they’re allowed to play — all those things we’re able to do,” said Megan.
While the team generates financial support to keep the project moving forward, its creators want to make sure their vision for LUMO doesn’t get lost.
“It’s not to create a new licensed toy, it’s not to put Dora the Explorer games on the floor. It’s to give kids the tools to make their own environments, and that part of it is really, really important to us,” said Meghan.
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