Amazon Glow is a new interactive device that allows children to communicate with their family and friends via video calls. Amazon Glow is a competitor to Facebook's Portal devices that are primarily aimed at families connecting over video. However, it offers more than just a connected screen experience. The device also creates an interactive, projected space that allows for virtual activities such as puzzles, art, and games.
Amazon Glow is a device that combines video, projection, and sensing technologies. The Glow is smaller than other smart screens available on the market. Instead, the Glow's 8-inch display is vertically mounted and a projector creates an area of touch-sensitive 19-inch space in front of it for virtual games and other activities with distant family members.
The device also includes a special mat for this purpose.
Amazon Glow allows children and their families to play games such as Memory Match, Chess, Checkers and Go Fish. You can choose from thousands of books for your child to read or use digital pencils, crayons or brushes to draw, as well as other fun activities. This is so that the digital, remote play feels more like a shared experience with another person.
The Amazon Glow can combine digital and physical play. It can scan a child's favorite toy and then create a custom puzzle using the digital scan projected on the flat surface in front. To make a puzzle, the child smashes the digital scanner into pieces with their hand. They can also scan a drawing that they have made on paper and digitally draw on it.
Glow Bits are physical objects that can be used with the new device. Glow Bits' first kit is the Tangram puzzle, which allows the child to use the puzzle pieces to solve problems while the distant family member uses digital puzzle shapes on the tablet screen.
Glow will launch special activities for children's entertainment favorites like Anna and Elsa in Frozen, Buzz from Disney and Pixars Toy Story, Woody and Buzz from Pixars Toy Story, characters from Mattels Barbie, Hot Wheels, Nickelodeons SpongeBob SquarePants, Dora the Explorer, Elmo and Zoe from Sesame Street and many others.
This device is intended for families who wish to keep in touch with their loved ones from faraway. This device could be useful for families with one parent who travels frequently, or grandparents who live far from each other. This could be useful during the pandemic, when families were spending more time apart to ensure Covid safety.
Amazon Glow does not allow the child to call any person they want. The Amazon Glow must be set up by a parent or guardian. This will include consenting to the contact list and authorizing the child to make calls. Parents could restrict access to the Amazon Glow to only trusted family members or close friends. The parent can also disable the microphone and cameras at any time by closing the physical privacy shutter.
Amazon Glow also is not an Alexa device. Therefore, no voice or video recordings can be made. It doesn't save or track location data, nor does it draw the drawings.
Amazon will however retain information such as activity history and profile preferences to recommend relevant content and activities for families with the Amazon Kids+ subscription.
Although the device will eventually sell for $299.99 at retail, it is being launched with a discount of $249.99. The package includes the mat, a case, the Tangram Bits puzzle and a 1-year subscription to Amazon Kids+. Amazon Kids+ is a premium paid service that provides unlimited access to thousands upon thousands of books, movies and TV shows for kids, as well as educational apps, games, and skills for Alexa.
Amazon Glow is still not widely available.
Customers will instead need to request invitations to the early access program at www.amazon.com/glow. Amazon stated that the first devices will be shipped to U.S. customers within weeks.
Developers are encouraged to apply for the SDK. It will be made available in the first half 2022.
