Lumo’s patented motion-tracking interaction system encourages children and adults to play games by using their bodies, instead of playing on tiny screens. For the same price as a good LED projector, Lumo can play movies AND make any room into an interactive game.
Lumo gets kids moving. Mobile games are here to stay, and they can be super educational and fun, but they’re passive. Kids play on Lumo’s 6’ x 4’ interactive surface by , jumping, kicking, stomping, moving, and waving their arms. They play the games they love without sacrificing physical activity.Also… when you want to clean up the game, you just turn it off. What could be easier?
Lumo lets you design your own games. We’ve included easy content creation tools for kids and artists; no coding required. Choose the type of game or effect you want to make, and customize it with your own art. Want to make a soccer game? No problem! Draw your own field, net, and ball and save it to your Lumo. Want to create an interactive play space around a toy castle? Draw a moat, fill it with water and sharks, and project it around the castle. You can even make the sharks interactive, so they attack when something approaches your castle. Seriously cool, right?Kids look at each other instead of at a screen. Unlike existing game consoles, Lumo doesn’t hook up to a TV. This is because, with Lumo, kids actually play on and in the game, using their bodies as controllers in a way that they could never do while staring at a screen. Kicking a ball on the floor is a lot more fun than kicking a ball on a screen, trust us. :)
Real-world artifacts can become part of the fun. We’ve figured out how to make toys become controllers. Lumo recognizes them, and paints them with light, changing how they look. A toy car becomes a spaceship—and catches on fire as it takes damage! We’re working on adding this tech to Lumo down the road, and if we hit some of our stretch goals, we’ll make it happen in the first release.
Lumo can also be used as a regular projector, to play movies and games. Lumo is built on the Android platform, so existing Android games can be played using a Bluetooth controller (they won’t be motion reactive though—developers need to convert their games for motion, using our SDK.). For the price of a regular projector, you’re also getting an interactive play-space, games, and content creation tools—which is pretty cool, if you ask us. :)
Lumo uses a simple sensor and clever programming to detect motion.This is different from solutions like Kinect and Leap Motion, which collect point cloud info using lasers. Lumo uses ambient IR light and a built-in, low resolution sensor to see whether something is moving or present on the projection area. Our patent-pending tracking algorithms do all the hard work, allowing interaction with the projected image.
Children can design and customize their own games for Lumo online by choosing a game template and uploading or drawing their own artwork.They can even adjust game physics using simple sliders, adjusting speed, size, gravity, and other parameters.Once they make a game, they can save it and send it to their Lumo. We will be launching Lumo with 10 game and effect templates :Dance Game, Hockey, Soccer, Pong, Herd Things, Race, Multiple-Choice Tile Game, Scatter (effect), Squash Things (effect), and Pond (effect).
We’ll continue to release templates based on what kids and parents request.
The Lumo team has been designing tools to allow artists to make their own interactive projections for over three years. These simple templates do not require any coding, and use sliders to control behaviors like speed and size. To make game creation simpler for children, we’ve added drawing tools, and we’re currently developing an asset library. Kids create games step-by-step, in a drag & drop format, consistent with other content creation tools for young children.
Lumo hangs on the wall using a small, safe, wall mounting bracket with a child lock out of reach of tiny hands. A standard power adapter (just like a laptop adapter) plugs into the wall. The projector ball swivels, so you can also mount Lumo from the ceiling.
When you want to play movies, just release the top latch and put Lumo on the table. You can even put Lumo on a bedside table and project on the ceiling. Another stretch goal is content designed for the ceiling, to ease your child into peaceful dreams. They can count real sheep!
It’s plug and play – Lumo creates games right away. You don’t need to hook anything up. There are no controllers. Just hang it up, turn it on, and start playing.
It has tons of games, out of the box – Lumo includes experiences we’ve built and tested over the past years, from cool light and nature effects, to single-player games, to cooperative and competitive team sports.
A roadmap to hundreds more games – Games designed for tablets using Unity can easily be ported to the motion reactive system. We’ll be working with developers to expand the variety of games available for Lumo. Even if a game isn’t motion-reactive, you can use a bluetooth controller like this one to play any existing Android game.
It also plays movies – connect Lumo to your computer, Chromecast, or Apple TV via an HDMI input to watch movies and TV.
You can take it anywhere – Lumo fits in a bag. You can’t fit your TV and Xbox in a bag. Just saying.
You don’t just play Lumo; you create and customize its games – To make their own games, kids register their Lumo on Lumoplay.com and use the template tools in their account. When they’re done, they can send their games straight to Lumo.
For example, making a soccer game is three steps. 1) draw a field, 2) draw the nets and 3) draw the ball.
This needs to happen – We’ve spent three years and invested our own money to build an entirely new kind of entertainment experience for kids, because we’ve seen first-hand how much kids and adults love playing with it. And we want to get the world playing and moving again.
The Lumo team includes 8 designers, developers, and engineers with over 20 years of combined experience developing computer vision and games, and building world-class interactive installations. Together, we’ve launched a successful interactive projection software platform for artists and advertisers that’s working in thousands of locations around the world right now; and we’ve created dozens of custom installations for museums, educational institutions, and sensory labs.
We have a deep understanding of the unique challenges of designing motion reactive projection experiences for kids. Challenges you may not have thought of, like detecting motion without lasers; making installation easy; automating complex lighting and calibration; building affordable hardware platforms; and managing remote upgrades. And of course, making games fun.
Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale has been an artist, musician, VJ, animator, and interactive designer. She’s founded two other companies in addition to Lumo. A sought-after speaker on play, immersive environments, and technology, she’s spoken at events such as SXSW, TEDx, and Ignite, and is currently working on a report on Data and Play for O’Reilly Media. She participated in Highway1’s hardware incubator last spring to finalize Lumo’s production readiness, and has visited China to work directly with component manufacturers and factories. Meghan was recently featured on the front page of Slashdot, speaking about Lumo at SXSW Interactive.
Lumo’s platform, content creation tools, and app market are being developed by the team behind the best-selling Po-motion.com interactive projection platform, launched in 2011. Keith Otto, Curtis Wachs, and Jocelyne Le Leannec invented and developed the software, website and content over a period of 3 years. While building Po-motion, Jocelyne spent her days speaking to artists, advertisers, and audio-visual installers, and relaying their suggestions to Keith and Curt, who spent years constantly improving the software interface, website, and features.
Keith Otto interviewed by Daily Planet at SXSW 2014
We’ve added two new software engineers to the team since we started creating Lumo. Steve Chubaty and Chris Iverach-Brereton are creating the game SDK and improving the motion detection algorithms.
Lumo’s hardware was developed in the Highway 1 incubator by Shawn Schaerer and Pedro Pereira, who worked with Meghan to source components and integrate them into a smaller, easier form factor, and collaborated with industrial designers and concept artists to develop the case for Lumo.
Children spend 40 hours per week in front of a screen, which may stunt their social and cognitive development. Lumo tackles this with an interactive playspace, combining compelling games that develop large motor-skills and allow children to look at each other while playing, instead of at a screen. We are also working towards toy tracking, which will allow Lumo to interact with real toys and physical objects.
Interactive projected experiences, once only available for commercial installations and budgets, are now affordable for families, thanks to recent improvements in projector, sensor, and processor performance. Help get kids off screens and onto interactive games that get their bodies moving again.
We need to manufacture Lumo! We started developing Lumo in 2013. We are now on the 6th Lumo prototype. It’s significantly smaller than the original. Check out some of our past prototypes, and you’ll see how far we’ve come:
We’ve been funding this project with revenues from commercial work, and we’re almost there. But our team is also bigger, and we need a bunch of stuff done in factories. That’s why we’re asking for help. Here’s what we need to move Lumo from prototype to manufacturing:
Lens tooling – Lumo has a bigger than average throw ratio (in order to create the biggest possible game area at the shortest possible distance). We need to have a special tool made just for Lumo so our projector gives kids a bright, wide play space.
Final DFM (design for manufacturing) – including smaller case design and integrated projector module. It’s easy to make one prototype, but now we need a design that can be replicated—and tested!—thousands of times in a factory.
SDK and app market development – we’ve expanded our team to work on the Lumo SDK development and provide direct support to a development community. We want to make sure we build developer support and resources that make sense, and that encourage game creators to participate in the Lumo project and port their hundreds of existing games to it. We also need to refine the mobile app which is used as a controller.
Factory setup – we will be choosing a factory in the next few months. We have relationships with a few. Our final choice will depend on the success of the campaign and how many Lumos we have to make. We will need things like test jigs, tools and molds.
Package design – Lumo will be sold online initially, so we won’t be spending a ton of money on a fancy package. But we do need something that passes a drop test and can withstand travel. We also need a setup document (which will be easy) and a warranty program (which will be harder).
Certification and Testing – We need to get Lumo certified before we can retail it. Since the components are all relatively common, this shouldn’t be a problem, but it is an expense.
Making hardware is hard, and lots of things can go wrong. Here are the three biggest risks and how we’ve mitigated them:
We don’t raise enough to manufacture in a factory. This is a possibility; Indiegogo is a flexible funding platform and we may not reach our goal. We have set the perk price for Lumo a bit higher than we’d like because NO MATTER WHAT, we will be able to make Lumo for this price. Even if we can’t make them in a factory and we’re forced to make each one by hand.
We don’t raise enough for lens tooling. If this happens, we will use an off-the-shelf lens. This means the throw ratio (the size of the projection) will be a bit smaller than we’d like. But Lumo will still work, and it will still be awesome.
We don’t finish all the features of the software. Lumo, as it exists right now, has ten games and works on the Android platform using a mouse as a controller. We travel the world showing it to people; you can see the actual Lumo prototype in all the videos. We will launch with a mobile app so you can control, load, and create games using your phone. However, this is a pretty big project. If the hardware is done first, we may ship with a limited number of features and push updates to the software afterwards.
We know you want to help make Lumo a reality. If you can’t back our project, we understand. After all, we’ve all been bootstrapping a hardware product for over two years (so we’re not exactly rich, and we’ve eaten a lot of Instant Ramen Noodles.) Here are some other things you can do that will help us a lot:
- Share this campaign with everyone you know, especially parents and people who work with children.
- Back us at a lower level. Every dollar helps!
- Follow us on Facebook! Or Twitter! Or Youtube!
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Jocelyne Le LeannecGame Producer & Community Manager
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Alistair CrollAdvisor