If you are a parent, especially a parent of a child around pre-school age, then you’ve heard of The Wiggles. For the rest of you, The Wiggles are a hugely popular Australian children’s music group formed in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1991. While they’ve typically been on TV and doing tours around the world, they’ve found a new way to reach their audience. They’ve come out with an iOS app that had a number of elements that made me want to review it.
First, let’s have a look at the home screen of the app:
There’s four different activities for your kids to choose from.
Fun Time With Videos: This allows your kids to watch performances of different songs that The Wiggles are known for.
Play Time With Faces: This is where things get cool. The app uses the front facing camera of your iOS device to add objects such as crowns and wigs to your kid’s face. I was pretty impressed with the fact that it was able to easily figure out where the face started and ended so that it could apply the object to it perfectly.
Fun Time With Songs: This takes Play Time With Faces and jacks it up by taking a Wiggles song and turning it into a sing along where your child can sing along with The Wiggles with clear indications when they should be joining in.
Fun Time With Stories: This was the most impressive section of the app. It used the front facing camera to take the image of whoever is in frame and turned it into this:
Meet Wags The Dog. What’s cool about this is any action that Wags does is live. If the child looking into the camera smiles, Wags smiles. If they open their mouth, Wags opens his mouth. That’s because there’s some ARKit action being used to pull this off. Wags, which is of course the child who is using this app, then participates in the story that’s being told. And because it is interactive, there’s a “learn through play” element here that add value to the experience. I’m going to further illustrate this by showing you a short clip of the ARKit functionality so that I can illustrate how interactive this is:
To add to all of the above, a lot of the content is downloadable. That means that the app will continue to be useful over time as new items get added.
Now I tested this using an iPhone XS and to get the most out of this app, you need to use an iPhone X or above as it makes objects such as Wags The Dog 3D. Otherwise, you’ll be viewing content in 2D which is fine and I am sure that the average 4 year old won’t notice or care. But 3D content is far more engaging if you ask me.
Now this is an app that is subscription based, and the terms are very clear and straightforward which I appreciate:
Finally there’s a clear privacy policy, there’s also a FAQ and the app does mention to have an adult assist with using the app. All of this gets the thumbs up from me. A yearly subscription is $24.99 a year CDN or a monthly subscription is $2.49 CDN a month. If you have pre-school kids, an iPad or ideally an iPhone X, have a look at this app as I think there’s more than enough here to keep them engaged for hours.
This entry was posted on November 5, 2018 at 7:55 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Review: The Wiggles For iOS
If you are a parent, especially a parent of a child around pre-school age, then you’ve heard of The Wiggles. For the rest of you, The Wiggles are a hugely popular Australian children’s music group formed in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1991. While they’ve typically been on TV and doing tours around the world, they’ve found a new way to reach their audience. They’ve come out with an iOS app that had a number of elements that made me want to review it.
First, let’s have a look at the home screen of the app:
There’s four different activities for your kids to choose from.
Meet Wags The Dog. What’s cool about this is any action that Wags does is live. If the child looking into the camera smiles, Wags smiles. If they open their mouth, Wags opens his mouth. That’s because there’s some ARKit action being used to pull this off. Wags, which is of course the child who is using this app, then participates in the story that’s being told. And because it is interactive, there’s a “learn through play” element here that add value to the experience. I’m going to further illustrate this by showing you a short clip of the ARKit functionality so that I can illustrate how interactive this is:
To add to all of the above, a lot of the content is downloadable. That means that the app will continue to be useful over time as new items get added.
Now I tested this using an iPhone XS and to get the most out of this app, you need to use an iPhone X or above as it makes objects such as Wags The Dog 3D. Otherwise, you’ll be viewing content in 2D which is fine and I am sure that the average 4 year old won’t notice or care. But 3D content is far more engaging if you ask me.
Now this is an app that is subscription based, and the terms are very clear and straightforward which I appreciate:
Finally there’s a clear privacy policy, there’s also a FAQ and the app does mention to have an adult assist with using the app. All of this gets the thumbs up from me. A yearly subscription is $24.99 a year CDN or a monthly subscription is $2.49 CDN a month. If you have pre-school kids, an iPad or ideally an iPhone X, have a look at this app as I think there’s more than enough here to keep them engaged for hours.
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This entry was posted on November 5, 2018 at 7:55 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.