Google is a company that has its hands in many different industries and markets. Just yesterday they announced that they were buying Launchpad Toys, a company that specializes in making augmented reality toys and tools for kids. They also recently invested $10 billion into SpaceX for their satellite based internet project, and now apparently Google is partnering up with toy maker Mattel to announce something pretty big in the coming weeks ahead. We don’t exactly what they have planned, but according to the invite whatever it is it’s happening on February 13th which is just under two weeks away.
Mattel appears to have sent out some invites to a special event to be held on February 13th, which will take place in New York City between 9 am and 10 am, with check-in for the event at 8:30. The invitation lists that there will be an exclusive announcement alongside a product debut and demonstration, and with Mattel seemingly leading the charge here we can only imagine that whatever it is, it must have a focus on toys and therefore the product that gets unveiled is likely going to be targeting kids. The question is what will the product be? All sorts of speculations are already flying around from a kid oriented wearable similar to Glass(although we doubt it since Google Glass itself isn’t even ready for consumers yet), to some sort of game for children similar to Ingress that could integrate with toys under the Mattel brand.
The event is inviting people to “explore what’s possible,” so that suggests that it’s something potentially innovative and groundbreaking, of course that could just be a more exciting choice of words for them to use too. Our money is on some sort of toy that integrates with augmented reality, perhaps Niantic is involved? 9 To 5 Google points out one good observation which is that the invite seems to be referencing Mattel’s old View-Master toy, so perhaps whatever they’re unveiling could be a new View-Master that uses augmented reality instead of the old cardboard disks with stereoscopic 3D pairs of color images. We also can’t shake this feeling that this might have something to do with yesterday’s announcement from Launchpad Toys which stated they would have something BIG to announce today, as Launchpad Toys has been making kids toys that work off of or work with augmented reality. So far we haven’t seen anything from Launchpad Toys so perhaps they’re announcement got pushed back to the 13th? That’s also if they’re involved in this in any way. There’s definitely lots of questions here, but if Google is involved it usually ends up being exciting and cool so keep an eye out on the 13th for some awesome news from Mattel and Google.