THE SUCCESS OF FURBY EYES TO SEE YOU LOOK WHO’S TALKING
How was the Furbish language play element developed? “The language was already developed by the original inventor. It’s actually a mix of lots of different languages,” say the Furby designers. “We made a few adjustments on the way, for instance creating new Furbish words for new or slang phrases.” Mechanically, this Furby is way beyond the original Furby and, amazingly, still only has one motor driving everything.
Furby designers introduced LCD eyes for four reasons: 1. “To create the most expressive toy ever. The LCD screens enabled us to make Furby communicate visually what it was thinking.” 2. “To communicate the different personalities.” 3. “To deliver magic in as many ways as possible; these eyes elevated it to a new interactive level.” 4. “The digital eyes and the plush creature really drive the idea home that Furby is a hybrid of organic creature and digital device. The big challenge was getting the mechanical eye-lids to move over the top of the LCD screens… it didn’t feel like Furby until it had eye-lids.”
SHAPING UP
How was Furby designed? “The icon came about early in our development process,” adds the Furby designers. “We wanted Furby to be easy to draw for kids as well as recognisable in many forms for branding purposes. As we sketched out how we wanted Furby to look in 3D, we discovered that we were always hitting the same basic shape: a coconut with ears. We added rubber to the ears to give Furby a modern tech/device look and feel.”
MAKING FURBY ‘APPY
The Furby designers always planned for Furby to connect with the digital world. ”We focused on mobile devices – most kids use them now and we had the right technology that would enable us to do a lot of fun things. We knew the big play patterns with Furby were nurturing, personality and language, so we allowed kids to feed Furby to see how it reacts depending on what personality it is in, and we added a translator so kids can learn the language.”
COLOURFUL CHARACTER
What was the idea behind the fur and bright colourways? “There are lots of animatronic plush toys/brands out there, taking their inspiration from nature, to look as realistic as possible,” say the Furby designers. “We instead decided to look at fashion, furniture and interior design trends and picked up on the neons and highly saturated RGB colours we saw in youth culture, where it was all about being bold and standing out.
“During our material exploration we discovered the process
of texturing plush and it all made sense. We wanted every Furby to have unique individual qualities so the combination of bold colour and unique texture really worked for us.”