Disney VP of Technology and Innovation on Clickables
Disney's fairy-themed world, Pixie Hollow, comes with a line of physical toys called Clickables. Bracelets and jewelry boxes allow users to trade virtual goods and add online friends by coming together in the real world. Disney Vice president of Technology and Innovation Chris Heatherly explained to the folks from frog design that the toys make the virtual world safer by tying it to real relationships, but there's an additional perk that I've discussed before: "Also, it allows kids to download virtual objects from their inventory and trade with their friends, which is another complicated thing we made simple. Most online worlds don't let you trade because it's hard to authenticate. We made that simple and seamless."
Actually, more and more kids worlds are actually encouraging trade of items between users, but Disney's physical approach is still unique. It encourages sharing as well, not just physical trading, which, in a world where some worlds seem primarily designed to drive new physical product purchases, is an oddity. It almost sounds like Disney is climbing on Chris Anderson's Free train before it builds up steam.
How did they come up with it?
We knew that online worlds were going to be a big deal and so we got about 50 of our smartest people together from different divisions and of different job types - marketing people, technology people, designers, even finance people and lawyers - and we had a big brainstorm. [...] We came up with probably a few hundred ideas but narrowed it down to 75 really good ones from the two days. Then we narrowed it down to our top 10 and top 5 and in there was the nugget of the Clickables concept. Then we decided that this was such an important area that we would create a dedicated team around it, called our Toymorrow team that would be a little swat team focused on technology in the toy space.
With a new team focusing on virtual worlds and an innovative toy department like Toymorrow, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of all of Disney's upcoming worlds.
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