Toy-making giant Hasbro wants to bring its kiddy-friendly offerings into the twenty-first century with a nifty smartphone accessory, which would let people scan their favorite toys using their iPhone.
Unless their favorite toy happens to be an iPhone, that is. Hey, given Apple’s popularity among youngsters, stranger things have happened!
While there’s no hard-and-fast release date for Hasbro’s invention, the U.S. Patent Office yesterday published a patent application describing how it might conceivably work. In essence, Hasbro would create a rotatable platform that kids could place their selected toy on, before turning a hand crank, and have the item scanned as a 3D image.
The patent application includes a base station, turntable, manual hand crank, bluescreen-style backdrop, and dock for holding onto your iPhone.
It would then be possible to either incorporate the 3D scan into a game (a technology not dissimilar to the real face-scanning technology in console games like NBA 2K16) or even output it to a 3D printer: thereby fulfilling my childhood dream of building a veritable clone army of Foot Soldiers for my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys to do battle with.
As noted, there’s no guarantee that this is something Hasbro will actually commercialize, although even as an (ostensible) adult, I’d love to see it hit stores.
In the meantime, you can check out similar apps which promise to achieve much the same result — albeit without the handy platform and, presumably, the functionality Hasbro would look to include.
Via: Patently Apple