“In 15 years’ time kids will find it strange for anyone to make a distinction between the real and the virtual world.” What sounds like the words of a computer geek in a science fiction film comes from the mouth of a young man who seems pretty grounded: 27-year-old Sélim Benayat is a biophysicist and co-founder of RosieReality, a start-up whose mission is to introduce children to programming and robotics using an AR robot.

Rosie is a friendly exploration robot from a distant galaxy. While traveling through space she got too close to earth and crashed on the planet. Rosie now needs the help of children to recover her memory and explore planet earth. This is the story behind the Rosie-App, which the developers hope to become a worldwide success.

Alternative to an “expensive toy”

The story starts with Sélim Benayat and Peter Spence, a former engineering & innovative design student at Imperial College London, playing around with a robot for pre-school children. The project was further developed in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich and marked the start of a close friendship between Benayat and Spence.

However, the ambitious young researchers soon noticed that the hardware involved in building a real robot-toy is far too complex and expensive: “Such a toy would not be affordable for parents or schools,” Benayat says. So they looked into alternatives to make robotics more accessible. This provided the initial spark for “RosieReality”.

Fusing virtual and real worlds

If you install the app on your smartphone, you see the real environment with Rosie as a virtual robot figure, in some ways as we know it from Pokémon Go, for example. The virtual robot can be "programmed" using simple commands: Players give Rosie instructions by moving the smartphone and selecting virtual objects. In contrast to games that are completely set in a virtual world - such as Minecraft - the real world merges with the virtual world - real "Augmented Reality".

What sounds relatively simple in theory is tricky to put into practice: one of the biggest challenges is to add a tangible and credible third dimension to a two-dimensional object, the smartphone screen in order to provide the user with a real 3D world experience. This is known in the jargon as “physicality”. This is where design specialists like Spence are needed. Interaction patterns need to be clear enough for everyone to understand. AR experiences are a new way of interacting with digital objects inhabiting the real world – users need some training.

New app keeps children’s interest for longer