XTractaurs teaches kids to play with DNA
Augmented reality is all the rage in toys these days. Being able to take your toy and give it life online give it’s an added dimension beyond just banging them together and pretending. Well, Xtractaurs takes the AugReal thing in cool direction by teaching kids about science while having fun battling it out with other dinosaurs online. And it may also unleash a little mad scientist while they’re at it.
The concept is right out of Jurrassic Park, sort of. Using the faux DNA extractor gun, kids take a sample of their dino’s DNA and upload it to the “secure” Xtractaurs website, where the dinosaur is brought to life in a virtual environment. In reality, kids are using the data built into the dino’s onboard chip to connect to Mattel’s website to do battle against evil “Megazaurs,” play puzzles and arcade games. Kids can even combine multiple DNA strands to create their own dinosaur and then play with them virtually. But it isn’t clear whether you’re taking on another player in the Xtractaurs universe or just taking on a virtual monster that the computer chooses. It would be cool if it had a global interactive element to it.
And each Xtractaur has different online content, and there are 15 in all to encourage kids to collect and combine (and with 15 different dinosaurs, there’s over 1,000,000 combinations). But once you have the basic Starter Kit – which has the DNA gun and CD software, kids only need to get each dinosaur separately (otherwise they’d have 15 different .
Check out these cool videos:
Cost is about $20 for each, but right now, the Starter Kit is on sale at Amazon for $10.
Hat tip – Inventorspot