Maze by Seedling

6–9

play

multi

seedling.com

Seedling’s Maze is the first fully cusotmizable DIY virtual reality experience for children. Kids and parents can create physical mazes in real time - Customizing them with music, selfies, and castles - and then walk through them in virtual reality. The Maze app empowers children to design their own games by creating traps, riddles, obstacles, and secret passages that they can share with family and friends. Kids can also challenge each other to Maze races.

Using Seedling’s creative activity kit, children can design their own virtual reality viewers and headphones, which they can pair with the Maze app.

Location

Website

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Los Angeles

seedling.com

@Seedling

Seedling

Q&A

How Seedling Created the First DIY Virtual Reality Experience for Kids

An excerpt from our conversation with Seedling Co-founder and CEO Phoebe Hayman

One of Seedling’s primary goals is to create experiences for children that are weaved through their own experiences. How does Maze put kids in the driver’s seat?

When we thought about Maze our first question was: How do we design a game that allows kids to really bring their stories to life within the app? They’re able to put in selfies and sound recordings, and share their experiences. Suddenly, it turns into an adventure that they are designing. So they’re asking: How do I tell my story? They start with bases and then they can customize it with castles and spaceships, turning it into a whole new world. That’s where we see the most empowerment, which we really love: How do we enable kids to have the most growth in an experience that they are willing to bite off? Our product developers are looking for the possibility of extension — the ability for a child to take the core activity we’ve given them and really dig in deep. Kids have to be able to continuously discover more content when they are excited about it.

What have you’ve learned about the way children perceive merging the digital and physical worlds? Do adults have a misconception about their ability to navigate them?

It’s interesting. I do think that it’s a construct of adults not being digital natives as our children are. Pokemon Go has been so relevant to our work in the space in seeing how excited kids are to have experiences that transcend these invisible bounds.

A lot of parents want their kids in the physical, real world. I think the challenge is that for kids the digital is real. They aren’t easily disillusioned by it. At the end of the day, they realize that they are interacting with people in the digital space just as they would in real life. We tend to think that the quality of that digital interaction is less than the quality of the interaction with real people. It will be interesting to see how that evolves. When kids are interacting with Maze that line is invisible to them. It completely makes sense. They’re excited that something real can appear in a digital form and vice versa. Kids get excited about the respect and freedom they are given to be able to see the world in their own way. A lot of the areas where we get into conflict with our kids are when we see the world differently. If we can create experiences that allow kids and parents to see the world in the same way, especially in the digital space, we see so much value there for relationship building.

When Fast Company covered Maze in May they asked the question: ‘Will play ever be the same?’ What’s your take on this?

We don’t think that it can be the same. The world is changing rapidly and our children are being brought up in a time where digital is completely normal to them. What we do strongly believe is that play patterns don’t change. The core fundamental base of play has not changed, does not change, and the need for play does not change. What does change are the tools kids use to experience play. That’s where we see a new version of play coming onto the market: play and tools that truly reflect the modern lifestyle.