Experiencing animal world: superpowers
Animal Superpowers (2008), by Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken, is a series of toys that work as sensory enhancements for kids. The toys allow kids to experience different animal extra-qualities in order to create empathy with the same creatures.
The ant apparatus allows kids to feel like an ant by magnifying their vision 50x, via microscope antennas placed in their hands. All the tiny cracks and details of a surface can be seen in this way. The bird device uses a GPS system and vibrates when kids are oriented in a certain direction – say towards an ice cream shop, home, or your pet. It was designed to resemble birds’ detection of geomagnetic fields. The giraffe device acts as a child-to-adult converter by changing kids’ voices to lower octaves and raising their view perspective by 30cm. Kids can suddenly see on the same level as adults.
