By Byron Kerman
The first interactive-media entertainment for kids was probably the decoder badge. When the announcer for 1940s radio program Captain Midnight excitedly relayed a coded message, young listeners frantically turned dials on their badges to decode it and save the hero. Usually, the high-priority missive was along the lines of “Drink More Ovaltine.”
The decoder badge is now a hand-held electronic device triggered by invisible light rays coming from the TV during the new Saturday-morning Batman cartoon. The “messages” are video-game “captures” that magically download from the TV to the device. And that device sits atop a toy Batmobile, which vrooms, lights up and moves in simpatico with the action on the cartoon.
Sound complicated? Not for your tech-savvy kids, who are probably already building your robot replacement in the basement. The psychological effect of the new set of electronic toys is simple and powerful. Batman starts the engine on the Batmobile, and the engine on the toy Batmobile fires up, too. To a child, it makes the TV show that much more real.
Making TV more real is the order of the day at Ted Koplar’s VEIL Interactive Technologies, headquartered in downtown St. Louis. The developer of the “Video Encoded Invisible Light” technology used by the new Batman cartoon and toys is also the former owner of KPLR-TV Channel 11 (which became WB-11 in 1997). To the rest of the country, Koplar is known by his signature product: the Japanese Voltron cartoons, which he adapted for American audiences in the ’80s.
Ever since Koplar started tinkering with the invisible-light technology, he’s been waiting for the world to get hip to TV interactivity. In the early ’90s he introduced “Toby the Terrier”—a toy dog that wagged its tail and barked along with the cartoon of the same name. Toby didn’t catch on, but that’s much less of a concern with The Batman. The “Dark Knight” franchise is already huge (with the next Batman movie set for release this summer), and the buzz on Batty’s new gadgets is big: Wired magazine recently declared the interactive Batmobile one of the best products of the year for 2004.
Koplar’s company might just be on the cusp of a tech revolution. The innovator says VEIL technology is not only the perfect way to wirelessly link up TVs to toys, but also to cell phones, PDAs, laptops and so on. “I think we’re just scratching the surface,” Koplar says. “When people in the creative industry get more involved, that’s when it will really get interesting.”
