A quick look back at when Microsoft made an interactive Barney toy | Hacker News Reader

A quick look back at when Microsoft made an interactive Barney toy

neowin.net

72 pointscududa32 comments

Wow! Nice trip down memory lane.

I was one of the three Electrical engineers on Barney (and the ActiMates product line). The three of us divided up the system design, radio and radio protocol design, PCB layout, and a bunch of other items. We spent a few weeks bringing up the factory in China.

I wrote the firmware for Barney, including the radio code and Co-designed the engine used for interactivity. It has a nice design in that the engine could be reused for other products.

I designed the protocol between the main MCU, and the voice chip, and wrote all the code for the voice chip.

I remember the Xerox work and was quite pleased that they weren't successful in getting it to say arbitrary things. The folks that own these properties are rightfully quite vested in the characters not saying or doing things they didn't authorize.

Any Easter eggs in that firmware? :)

Not Barney.

In Arthur and DW, on my birthday, of you press the correct sensor sequence, they will sing me happy birthday.

On Teletubbies, there is an Easter egg that I think scrolls the developers names but it has been too long i.e. I know there is an Easter egg but I not 100% sure about the message.

Ah...my little step-brother had the Arthur one. "Hey hey, it's time to play!" every morning....

I was around high-school-senior age and remember thinking how cool it was to have toys with even some semblance of "smarts" in them.

Of course it was mostly a few preprogrammed routines and a nice chunk of stored audio with the daily "fun facts", but still way cooler than the old Teddy Ruxpin. I bet they'd be cool to hack around on.

Nowadays they'd be tied to some mobile phone app/account and end up on the HN front page when someone finds the database of recorded audio and video on an unsecured server somewhere.

I was just old enough to be on the older end to appreciate this toy and to really dig the neat tech tricks it was pulling off. Thanks for making this cool toy.

I always wondered what signaling the TV transmitter was looking for in the video stream. Was it extra data in the closed captioning area?

This looks like the relevant patent for it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6281939B1/en "Method and apparatus for decoding data encoded in the horizontal overscan portion of a video signal"

Good job finding it. The patient calls out two other key patents.

It also describes how the data is encoded.

My dad worked on that! He says it got canceled because at the time Microsoft only kept projects that made XX millions of dollars, and even though the project was profitable, it didn’t reach that threshold. They also made Arthur and DW animatronics.

He got to meet the guy who voiced Barney. Apparently he did some profane jokes in Barney’s voice, and then asked them to not save those recordings. Too bad.

He still has an unopened retail box of Barney. Probably not worth anything.

It looks like the whole thing with pc pack goes for about 100 on ebay

Many years ago, some researchers at Xerox PARC hacked Barney to be an interactive interface, to the amusement of many.

Here is a longer writeup: https://dourish.com/barney/index.html

And an excerpt: Using the Barney Protocol Stack, we built a number of applications for Barney. Some were simply feedback applications, that would tell you the progess of activities such as printing your document. Some were monitoring applications that revealed the state of other systems, such as the current network status. Some were communicative applications, such as one which allowed two people to communicate through "Barney semaphore".

So far, getting Barney to say things he doesn't already know how to say still eludes us. We know he uses LPC encoding, but we don't know how the LPC information is striped across the transmitted packets. So for now, our Barney applications can only say things that Barney already knew how to say on one of his applications. The up-side of this is that Barney is always in character; he'll say "Super-dee-duper" rather than "print job accepted". The down-side of this is that it's very hard to find instances of Barney saying negative things; so he'll say "Please try again" (the most negative thing he has to say) instead of "your stupid printer messed up again".

You can read a paper about this work that will appear in the CHI'99 conference https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/302979.303021.

This thread is insane. Practically every member of the team that worked on this product is here posting.

We're putting the band back together!

NEW FOR 2023: ActiMates Grimace! (the other purple blob)

I knew a guy who worked at MS when they were developing the Barney doll. He signed up to beta/play-test the doll since he had a son in the target age range.

He left work on Friday with the new Barney doll.

When he came into work on the following Monday, he told his co-workers, "Looks like I'm going to HAVE to get a Barney doll for my son when they're released."

The power of Barney...

He also mentioned that when all the Actimates dolls and other consumer-related products were released, the internal-only Microsoft store looked like a techie-version of FAO Schwarz instead of a Microsoft-leaning Egghead software store.

The bean counters at MS killed a lot of product ideas when they came up with the high revenue bar for any possible new products - as if anyone could predict that stuff accurately.

What's funny is that in the internal Microsoft Store you could buy a boxed copy of SQL Server Enterprise Edition for next to nothing, but a Microsoft Teddy Bear cost a fortune. I used all my Microsoft Dollars on stupid toys from the store. Their teddy bears were the softest ever. I lost them to First Wife in the divorce.

How many microsoft bucks for a new wife + teddy?

Forgot to mention some of the funny Microsoft KBs of the time like Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603154438/support.microsoft....

My current boss worked on ActiMates. He'd probably be happy to answer questions if anyone here has any for me to pass along.

My very first intern software engineering job was at 7th Level and it was absolutely surreal walking through the QA lab during my interviews and seeing umpteed buggy animatronic Barney toys going through their test loops.

Nice. I was at msft then and had access to the code. My friend and I had a great time hacking his daughter's Barney to make it say things it shouldn't.

It also worked with the TV show and recorded VHS's. I think the TV connection worked via the closed captioning somehow. Would be interesting to get more under-the-hood technical details.

(Also, has anyone made a ChatGPT-powered talking doll yet?)

The data was encoded of the left side of the picture. I believe there is a patent on this.

My friend, Leonardo Del Castillo invented and productized this. So, look for his name. He was the electrical engineer lead.

These appear to be the relevant patents:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6415439B1/en includes some aspects of the MIDI protocol in the tables; does this cover the LPC information the SWEETPEA authors couldn't figure out?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6317714B1/en

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6281939B1/en

It doesn't look like anyone's published a reverse-engineering of the protocol.

Where does one get a 49.86mhz(??) maker-level transmitter these days?

Wow! Even more interesting than I guessed, very cool!

“Microsoft ActiMates TV Pack for Interactive Barney” is like the platonic Microsoft product name lol

Barney Subsystem for Television

I remember Actimates Barney. There was an Arthur Read toy too. Back in the days of evil Microsoft hysteria, there seemed something very "they're coming for your children" about it. Of course compared to Microsoft requiring a Microsoft account for Minecraft and such, it was probably totally innocuous.

I am still confused why Microsoft dipped its toes into the toy business waters. It didn't fit into their mission and it didn't fit with the rest of their products.

It's a way to connect with youth, and to demonstrate their prowess with technology.

Same reason TI put out the Speak-n-Spell.

This.

The voice chip on the ActiMates was a derivative of the TI Speak-n-Spell chip.

Presumably the thinking was it would raise brand awareness and sell Windows licenses. Schools in that era were also Mac heavy so focusing on PC toys was possibly a way to get kids into the MS ecosystem.

Xbox didn't fit in with anything else they were doing, but now look.

Xbox was there to push DirectX as the de-facto graphics standard and lock-in a big part of the available market.

If you care enough you can find some interesting blog posts by Alex St. John where he writes about it.

Interactive WebTV was the future.

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