Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
So we have a LeapStart book for the preschooler. I haven’t managed to work out how it works. It has a stylus that you touch things on the pages of books that you set into the leapstart. I can’t work out how it knows what page it’s on, they are too flimsy for any electronics in the pages. Any ideas? As far as I can see on the stylus it has a pressure sensor and some sort of visual sensor up by the pressure sensor.
Edit: mystery solved!! See replies!
Kiddo stopped playing so I took a better picture of the stylus.
@CatherineFlick @floriann @tante ah that's the new design. We had the first gen one which has x/y position sensing of the 'pen' in the bookcase and you had to tell it which page you were looking at before it worked.. very much simpler, just a magnetic stylus tip.
I replaced the pen at least twice! 
The dot pattern encoding idea is very smart, almost stenography.
@CatherineFlick sounds a bit like the TipToi thing popular in Germany. Usually the pages have invisible markings printed in the paper that the visual sensor picks up.
@tante ah! I wondered about whether it was picking up patterns in the pages but they were often just one colour and it wasn’t obvious sometimes where the boundaries of objects were
@CatherineFlick i just learned recently that a similar product in germany reads tiny imprinted visual codes.
I didn't research further how they look like but a indicator is that this approach requires good lighting. I guess one might see the codes using magnifying glasses.
@CatherineFlick Intriguing. Now I had to know, too! They start explaining it in this video at about 2min30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4FUZcF_IC4
@SylviaFysica yeah! Someone else linked it, it’s very clever!