[HN Gopher] A quick look back at when Microsoft made an interact...
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A quick look back at when Microsoft made an interactive Barney toy
Author : cududa
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-07-09 16:58 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neowin.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neowin.net)
| jasonhong wrote:
| Many years ago, some researchers at Xerox PARC hacked Barney to
| be an interactive interface, to the amusement of many.
|
| Here is a longer writeup: https://dourish.com/barney/index.html
|
| And an excerpt: Using the Barney Protocol Stack, we built a
| number of applications for Barney. Some were simply feedback
| applications, that would tell you the progess of activities such
| as printing your document. Some were monitoring applications that
| revealed the state of other systems, such as the current network
| status. Some were communicative applications, such as one which
| allowed two people to communicate through "Barney semaphore".
|
| So far, getting Barney to say things he doesn't already know how
| to say still eludes us. We know he uses LPC encoding, but we
| don't know how the LPC information is striped across the
| transmitted packets. So for now, our Barney applications can only
| say things that Barney already knew how to say on one of his
| applications. The up-side of this is that Barney is always in
| character; he'll say "Super-dee-duper" rather than "print job
| accepted". The down-side of this is that it's very hard to find
| instances of Barney saying negative things; so he'll say "Please
| try again" (the most negative thing he has to say) instead of
| "your stupid printer messed up again".
|
| You can read a paper about this work that will appear in the
| CHI'99 conference
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/302979.303021.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Forgot to mention some of the funny Microsoft KBs of the time
| like _Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own_.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20040603154438/support.microsoft....
| derekja wrote:
| Nice. I was at msft then and had access to the code. My friend
| and I had a great time hacking his daughter's Barney to make it
| say things it shouldn't.
| breadwinner wrote:
| I am still confused why Microsoft dipped its toes into the toy
| business waters. It didn't fit into their mission and it didn't
| fit with the rest of their products.
| Zeetah wrote:
| Wow! Nice trip down memory lane.
|
| I was one of the three Electrical engineers on Barney (and the
| ActiMates product line). The three of us divided up the system
| design, radio and radio protocol design, PCB layout, and a bunch
| of other items. We spent a few weeks bringing up the factory in
| China.
|
| I wrote the firmware for Barney, including the radio code and Co-
| designed the engine used for interactivity. It has a nice design
| in that the engine could be reused for other products.
|
| I designed the protocol between the main MCU, and the voice chip,
| and wrote all the code for the voice chip.
|
| I remember the Xerox work and was quite pleased that they weren't
| successful in getting it to say arbitrary things. The folks that
| own these properties are rightfully quite vested in the
| characters not saying or doing things they didn't authorize.
| mdturnerphys wrote:
| My current boss worked on ActiMates. He'd probably be happy to
| answer questions if anyone here has any for me to pass along.
| shannifin wrote:
| It also worked with the TV show and recorded VHS's. I think the
| TV connection worked via the closed captioning somehow. Would be
| interesting to get more under-the-hood technical details.
|
| (Also, has anyone made a ChatGPT-powered talking doll yet?)
| Zeetah wrote:
| The data was encoded of the left side of the picture. I believe
| there is a patent on this.
|
| My friend, Leonardo Del Castillo invented and productized this.
| So, look for his name. He was the electrical engineer lead.
| cbsks wrote:
| My dad worked on that! He says it got canceled because at the
| time Microsoft only kept projects that made XX millions of
| dollars, and even though the project was profitable, it didn't
| reach that threshold. They also made Arthur and DW animatronics.
|
| He got to meet the guy who voiced Barney. Apparently he did some
| profane jokes in Barney's voice, and then asked them to not save
| those recordings. Too bad.
|
| He still has an unopened retail box of Barney. Probably not worth
| anything.
| fuber2018 wrote:
| I knew a guy who worked at MS when they were developing the
| Barney doll. He signed up to beta/play-test the doll since he had
| a son in the target age range.
|
| He left work on Friday with the new Barney doll.
|
| When he came into work on the following Monday, he told his co-
| workers, "Looks like I'm going to HAVE to get a Barney doll for
| my son when they're released."
|
| The power of Barney...
|
| He also mentioned that when all the Actimates dolls and other
| consumer-related products were released, the internal-only
| Microsoft store looked like a techie-version of FAO Schwarz
| instead of a Microsoft-leaning Egghead software store.
|
| The bean counters at MS killed a lot of product ideas when they
| came up with the high revenue bar for any possible new products -
| as if anyone could predict that stuff accurately.
| bitwize wrote:
| I remember Actimates Barney. There was an Arthur Read toy too.
| Back in the days of evil Microsoft hysteria, there seemed
| something very "they're coming for your children" about it. Of
| course compared to Microsoft requiring a Microsoft account for
| Minecraft and such, it was probably totally innocuous.
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(page generated 2023-07-09 23:01 UTC)