Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken

The Royal College of Art recently showed work in progress, and this was by far my favorite. A collaboration between Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken, these toys are collectively called "Animal Superpowers." I think they're so sweet and innocent - the type of things grown-ups want to play with too.

Here is the rundown from Kenichi's website:

Experimental series of toys as sensory enhancements for kids to experience animal superpowers. Those 5 devices are special tools allowing kids to feel how like an animal or experience special extra qualities how they perceive the environment.

• Bird - sense of direction with a head mounted solenoid compass
• Ant - feeling like an ant seeing 50x through microscope antennas on your hands
• Giraffe - a child to adult concerter changing your voice & perspective
• Elephant - shoes picking up transmitting vibrations from fellows
• Electric Eel - enhanced spatial vision through head mounted Theremin

Rather than creating a series of toys and super-heros with weapons, we are interested in experimenting with the qualities of changing the perception as well as sensory enhancements changing your perspective or creating empathy with animals.

We believe curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children and our goal is not just to create a series of devices for exploration and curiosity that might be just fun for one afternoon. Much more we are interested in providing tools seeing the world through a different lens and to learn more about ourselves. We believe those devices could possibly create empathy with animals, experiencing what they experience as well as providing an interface to communicate with them.

This is just a start of the experiment and we believe it is possible to create also tools for play with deeper layers, learning levels and more layered interactivity that could even become an extension of your body rather than just an traditional play-object.