V.Smile Baby = crib potato?

This just feels wrong.

As mentioned here before, toddlers love buttons. They take their natural instinct to explore their surroundings and poke everything to see what happens. And in a world where there are buttons everywhere, there’s a lot to explore.

Manufacturers of kids’ products know this and respond accordingly. Naturally, they make toys with lots of big brightly-colored buttons. They make noises! Yay! Funny things happen! Yay! They learn stuff! Yay!

But these new products make me a little queasy.

“The V.Smile™ Baby Infant Development System goes beyond passive developmental videos with a breakthrough, interactive approach to learning.” It’s an educational toy that connects wirelessly to your television. In other words, it’s a remote control for infants and toddlers.

You can choose from three grow-with-me play modes. Select the Play Time mode on the panel and watch your baby play with the colorful, easy-to-press buttons while hearing fun, educational phrases. Select the Watch & Learn mode and your baby can watch educational animations complete with baby sign language. Finally, as your baby grows, select the Learn & Explore mode where he can actually direct the play on the screen by choosing the subjects he wants to explore.

I imagine it’s very educational. But there’s something a little odd about teaching infants how to basically use a remote control. Is this something we really want to encourage? Watching TV from the crib?

Here’s the next product for 3-7 year olds, the V.Smile TV Learning System.

Now the kids get a joystick to play with. More of the same, but a bit more sophisticated. Four colored buttons that trigger different events and a huge orange button for Enter. One cool note: the joystick can slide around from left to right to accommodate left- or right-handers. Okay, I like that.

So at what point do ethics come into play? Even if the products onscreen are educational, should we be training babies to use buttons at a year old? There will be plenty of time for that. I can’t help wonder how today’s kids will turn into adults. With that much exposure to digital products, with that innate facility for buttons, knobs, and screens, with that much intuition for interfaces, what will the world look like?

And of course, even though I bag on these products, I wonder how they can be hacked to use at work. I want the red button for browsing, the yellow button for mailing, the blue button for writing and the green button for listening.