Today
I bought an i-Top at Toys ‘R Us for $4.98 plus tax. Several of
the engineers that I work with had shown them to me. When I first
saw them, I was immediately
impressed … using a moving surface of a top, along with a strip of
light emitting diodes (LEDs) to turn the top into a digital
scoreboard. This week I was at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference in San Diego, and I saw a similar concept … on a cell
phone and on a pager. That’s what had me buy the i-Top. All
of these products are doing similar things … using some sort of
accelerometer to detect motion and then pulse the LEDs on and off at
the correct rate to make LED numbers, words, and images that seem to
float in the air. Or on the surface of a top.

There
are three really cool aspects of these toys … first, it is a
demonstration of the rapidly declining size and costs of the next
generation of sensors. Second, it is the presence of computing
power in the smallest of objects. Third … it is cheap.
The chips in this little top, for example, are able to detect both
time, and rotation … tracking each rotation of the top to know
exactly where and when to blink a particular LED to represent a
particular pixel in a letter or number. At the O’Reilly
conference it hit me that there are numerous places that these displays
will probably show up before long. I’m thinking about how to
capitalize on this stuff.

First, I started to think about how to create a version of this for
bicycle wheels. Imagine if your bicycle had patterns and messages
being displayed to others while you pedal down the street. Of
course for this to work, you would also have to have a way to track
“up” or “down” so that the messages were always readable and not upside
down. The next idea that hit me while writing this post is to put
these on car hubcaps. We already see the “spinners” that people
are putting on their cars, and the neon tubes underneath the car
body. It is only a matter of time before we’ll start to see these
new forms of art … these new expressions of emotion or message … on
a wide range of the surfaces around us.

In all, I am left impressed. At the innovation that can turn the
simplest of toys … a top … into so much more. In to a new
generation of toys that demonstrate just how inexpensive and powerful
our capabilities are growing. Go buy am i-Top … they are a fun
toy … and can make you think.

[P.S. You can right-click the images and select View Image to see a
bigger version of each image.  Maybe next time I’ll make them
links …]