ONCE UPON A TIME -- February of '97, to be precise -- Sir Dave of Hampton journeyed to the mystical Dark Kingdom of Niewe Yoarke, to partake of the Grande Annual Toye Faire. There he met a self- proclaimed "virtual pet" named Tomagochi, an ogre from a distant land who soon cast a spell over the children of the Kingdom, forcing them to feed, pet, and care for him and remain at his beck and call.Sir Dave -- himself a free-lance toy designer -- thought the cruel Tomagochi was too sterile and too "flat": its young users had to enter Tomagochi's own world of pushbuttons and pixels, and learn the rules Tomagochi laid down, in order to receive their virtual rewards.
"Far better", said Sir Dave, "for such toys to be softer, fuzzier, and more approachable." Like real pets, they should enter instead into the physical world of the child, to dance, talk, and listen, to react to loud sounds [dah lee-koo wah!], see changes in lighting, and detect motion, and to sneeze, giggle [he-he!], burpe, and fahrte [AHW-ohh!].
And so, by the Law of St. Moore, Sir Dave returned to his cabin in the Enchanted Forest of the Weste and created Furby, a child's toy clever enough to play games, intelligent enough to be taught new tricks, and sociable enough to talk, sing, and dance with other Furbys when the grown-ups were trying to watch the news.
And, most importantly, cheap enough to sell for under thirty bucks.
The rest, as they say, is history. Furby, now manufactured by Tiger, became THE hit toy of the 1998 holiday season, outselling by far the previous year's trend-setter, St. Tickle-Me of Elmo.
-jhw
In this presentation Dave Hampton will discuss the process by which a dumb little furball grew to become Furby: Where the idea came from, how it got started, what problems arose in its development, and how the right attitude can move you past roadblocks. When unsolveable problems arise, Dave found, it's best not to solve them; instead, reevaluate your goals. With toys, as in nature, evolution is the key to success.
Dave may also discuss the design and development of "Furbish", a true, functional language with formal rules of syntax and grammar derived from English, Japanese, Hebrew, and Thai.
And what became of Sir Dave and his little Furby pals? They, of course, are living happily ever after, in an remote region of the Tahoe National Forest, well off the beaten path.
About the speaker:
Dave Hampton began fiddling with electronic hardware at age 7 or 8. By 13 he was repairing TVs and radios to earn money to buy components for Tesla coils and transmitters. During a stint in the Navy he became a specialist at in-flight repairs of electronic instruments for P-3 Orion airplanes, and after that became an industrial test engineer.
The problem with micros, though, is that they clouded the distinction between bugs in hardware and software, so in 1980 Dave decided he'd better learn to program. As a game designer he wrote the game "Q*bert" for the Atari 2600, and from 1986 to 1990 worked for Mattel in the New Business Concepts unit -- a sort of toy-development think tank.
In 1990 Dave founded Sounds Amazing!, a design firm whose clients include Neil Young (Lionel Train controls) and Microsoft (Barney).
Some Furby Links;
As a short visit with our favorite search engine, Google , shows, there are a number of interesting sites on the web for Furby fanciers. I've collected a few I think might be of interest to the EE380 community. Suggestions for additions and deletions gratefully accepted.
Contact information:
Dave Hampton
Furby Autopsy
Furby Links
Furby.com
Furby Fun