Amazon introduces Amazon Glow, an interactive, video calling machine for teenagers and households – TechCrunch

Amazon as we speak launched Amazon Glow, a brand new, interactive machine geared toward households that permits children to work together with members of the family and different distant family members over video calls. While one thing of a competitor to Facebook’s line of Portal devices, that are additionally largely geared toward connecting households over video, Amazon Glow differentiates itself by offering extra than simply one other related display expertise. It additionally makes use of know-how to create an interactive, projected area in entrance of the machine to supply a floor for digital actions — like video games, artwork, puzzles, and extra — to present the sensation of an in-person expertise,

To achieve this, Amazon Glow combines immersive projection, sensing applied sciences, and video right into a single machine. Unlike different good screens in the marketplace, the Glow doesn’t appear to be a tiny TV. Instead, its 8-inch show stands up vertically and a projector creates a 19-inch touch-sensitive area in entrance of the show for enjoying digital video games and fascinating in different actions with distant members of the family who’re taking part on their very own tablets.

This gameplay takes place on a particular mat, which can also be included with the machine.

With Amazon Glow, children and their family members can play video games like Chess, Checkers, Go Fish, or Memory Match. They can choose from hundreds of youngsters’s books to learn collectively or draw utilizing digital pencils, crayons, brushes, or spray paint, amongst different actions. The thought is to make the distant, digital play really feel extra just like the type of expertise you’d have should you have been in the identical room with the opposite individual.

The Amazon Glow also can do issues that mix bodily objects and digital play. For instance, it could scan the kid’s favourite toy then flip it right into a customized jigsaw puzzle by projecting the digital scan on the flat floor in entrance of the machine. The baby then smashes the digital scan into bits with their hand to show it right into a puzzle. Or they’ll scan a drawing they made on paper then rework it into a brand new paintings, with their member of the family’s assist, by digitally drawing on the scanned model.

It additionally ships with one thing known as “Glow Bits,” that are bodily objects designed to work with the brand new machine. The first Glow Bits equipment is the Tangram puzzle recreation, the place the kid makes use of the puzzle bits to resolve challenges whereas the distant member of the family performs alongside utilizing digital puzzle shapes on their pill’s display.

Image Credits: Amazon

At launch, Glow will assist particular actions from favorites in kids’s leisure, like Anna and Elsa from “Frozen;” Woody and Buzz from Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story;” characters from Mattel’s Barbie and Hot Wheels; Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer; Elmo, Zoe different others from “Sesame Street,” and others.

The machine is especially geared toward households who need to keep in higher contact with others from a distance. This may very well be used with households the place one guardian travels lots, with grandparents who dwell far-off, and so forth. It may be useful throughout this pandemic period, the place households have been spending extra time remoted from one another for Covid security.

Amazon Glow doesn’t enable the kid to simply name anybody they select, in fact. A guardian or guardian should first configure the Amazon Glow by offering consent and pre-approving the contacts the kid is allowed to name. This means, dad and mom may restrict the machine solely to members of the family or trusted household mates. And at any time, the guardian can disable the cameras and microphone by closing the bodily privateness shutter on the machine.

Amazon Glow can also be not an Alexa machine, so no voice or video recordings are collected. It additionally doesn’t observe or save location knowledge and even the drawings which can be made.

However, Amazon will retain issues like profile preferences and exercise historical past to recommend related actions and content material accessible with the included Amazon Kids+ subscription that households might need to attempt.

Image Credits: Amazon

The machine will ultimately retail for $299.99, however is launching with a reduced worth of $249.99. It comes with the mat, a mat case, the Tangram Bits puzzle recreation, and a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+. (Amazon Kids+ is a paid service that provides limitless entry to hundreds of kid-friendly books, motion pictures, TV reveals, instructional apps, video games, and premium children’ expertise for Alexa.)

Amazon Glow just isn’t but broadly accessible.

Instead, prospects might want to request an invite to affix the early entry program at www.amazon.com/glow. The first units will then ship to U.S. prospects within the weeks forward, mentioned Amazon.

Developers are invited to use to entry the SDK, which can be accessible within the first half of 2022.