When you look back on the installations artist and designer Chris O’Shea‘s created in the past, it’s clear that the concept of play is a key component in his work. Add to this the fact that lots of these projects have been aimed at—or at least embraced by—children and it’s understandable why he’s chosen to move into the digital toy market with his latest release.Today O’Shea launched Makego, an app that turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a toy vehicle—a race car, ice-cream truck, and river boat. The app marries the virtual and physical so digital natives can combine the analogue joy of physically pushing a race car along, but with the added benefit of interactive augmentation.O’Shea’s previous work has included Hand from Above where a huge hand interacts with the public, prodding and tickling them in real-time via a digital screen. And also his Kinect-based installations like Body Swap, which is pretty self-explanatory, and Little Magic Stories, which brings drawings to life for kids to interact with.Quite a bit of interactive art is intrinsically understood by kids because they have an instinctive desire to play, which is what a lot of the projects we’ve seen in recent years allow users to do. And some digital artists, like Theo Watson, Hellicar & Lewis and O’Shea, make work that is aimed specifically at children because they can immediately grasp and appreciate it without any of our adult hangups.So, to find out a bit more about why an artist makes the leap into toy making, we fired off a few questions to O’Shea over email.The Creators Project: It's interesting that as an artist you've chosen to move into toys. Why the move from installations to digital toys?
Chris O’Shea: All of my installations were about play, getting people to use their imagination and expressing themselves in interesting ways. More and more of what I was doing was now starting to appear in people’s homes, on their games consoles, as the technology got more advanced and cheaper. Kinect was a big step in this, as many of us doing work in this area are using Kinect in our installations. But now you can have similar experiences on the Kinect Fun Labs, playing with their toys or experiments. Artists like myself could one day have our installation experiences on Xbox.It is also about the size of the audience. Something for a weekend festival might be seen by a few hundred, or an exhibition [by] a couple of thousand. Installations are very temporary and only live in the video documentation we make. A ‘product’ or digital toy app has the potential to be enjoyed by a much wider audience.
It just seemed like a very logical idea to me. Rather than control a toy car with a phone, what if the iPhone was the toy car? More and more toys (like Hot Wheels cars) are getting cameras and screens built into them now. Instead of bringing out a plastic toy car that people could buy and put their phone in, I really wanted to facilitate creative play between a child and their parent. Building things together with their hands, out of cardboard or LEGO, then putting in the app and playing with the characters on screen inside their vehicle shell.What similarities and differences are then in creating a digital toy and a creating a digital artwork?
This app took longer to do because you have less control over the environment in which people are using it. In an installation, you build a very specific computer for the job. With an app, you have to make sure it runs on many different devices and iOS versions. The process was quite similar—after coming up with the idea, do a rough prototype, test on some children, change, tweak, test and repeat.Are apps going to play an increasingly bigger part in the toy industry?
Yes, I think it’ll be one of the largest growing trends in the toy industry this year. The ‘appcessory’ is used to get technology savvy kids interested in old toys again. Most of it will be really bad, but there will be some good examples. We are already starting to see board games with an iPad in the middle, soft toys containing an iPhone, and every remote control toy around controlled via an app. I posted lots of examples of this on my blog.
@stewart23rd
Advertisement
Chris O’Shea: All of my installations were about play, getting people to use their imagination and expressing themselves in interesting ways. More and more of what I was doing was now starting to appear in people’s homes, on their games consoles, as the technology got more advanced and cheaper. Kinect was a big step in this, as many of us doing work in this area are using Kinect in our installations. But now you can have similar experiences on the Kinect Fun Labs, playing with their toys or experiments. Artists like myself could one day have our installation experiences on Xbox.
Advertisement
What were your inspirations for Makego?
It just seemed like a very logical idea to me. Rather than control a toy car with a phone, what if the iPhone was the toy car? More and more toys (like Hot Wheels cars) are getting cameras and screens built into them now. Instead of bringing out a plastic toy car that people could buy and put their phone in, I really wanted to facilitate creative play between a child and their parent. Building things together with their hands, out of cardboard or LEGO, then putting in the app and playing with the characters on screen inside their vehicle shell.What similarities and differences are then in creating a digital toy and a creating a digital artwork?
This app took longer to do because you have less control over the environment in which people are using it. In an installation, you build a very specific computer for the job. With an app, you have to make sure it runs on many different devices and iOS versions. The process was quite similar—after coming up with the idea, do a rough prototype, test on some children, change, tweak, test and repeat.Are apps going to play an increasingly bigger part in the toy industry?
Yes, I think it’ll be one of the largest growing trends in the toy industry this year. The ‘appcessory’ is used to get technology savvy kids interested in old toys again. Most of it will be really bad, but there will be some good examples. We are already starting to see board games with an iPad in the middle, soft toys containing an iPhone, and every remote control toy around controlled via an app. I posted lots of examples of this on my blog.