Samsung launches a new category of interactive children’s apps for Smart TV

New York, December 7, 2012. – Samsung Electronics, a leading global manufacturer of premium consumer electronics, has introduced a new category of children’s interactive applications for Samsung Smart TVs in the American market. New apps will allow children to control the TV using gestures, a “virtual mirror” function and connecting external mobile devices to the TV, providing an exciting time aimed at education, development and entertainment.

Six new apps for Smart TV: “Playing Nado Hutos,” “Sticker Theater,” “Kolobok,” “Three Little Pigs,” “Kindergarten,” and “Best Kids Song” are already available to users worldwide. By the end of this year, Samsung plans to double the amount of TV content aimed at children’s audiences.

“Samsung has worked hard over the past few years to give consumers a more intuitive way to control and interact with their TVs,” said Ken Sik Lee, vice president of Visual Display at Samsung Electronics. – These innovations have made Samsung Smart TVs even more accessible to young children, particularly those who haven’t yet mastered the remote control.”.

One of the new applications for children – Playing Nado Hutos – includes Smart Interaction features that allow young viewers to control the TV using their voice and gestures. Playing Nado Hutos lets kids control a character named Hutos by moving their hand in front of the TV screen. A young Samsung technology innovation tester can tickle or pet Hutos and help him interact with different objects in the game. Characters will react and act differently based on gestures. In addition, the app shows an on-demand video narrating Hutos’ life story to create a stronger emotional connection with the game’s characters.

With the growing convergence of TVs and mobile devices, three new apps from Samsung TV – Sticker Theater, Kolobok and Three Little Pigs – offer additional features when used in conjunction with a mobile app that parents can download from Samsung Apps or Google Play. For example, in Sticker Theater, children can fully exercise their creativity by creating their own mini-movies. A child can choose the environment, location and characters, and then record dialogues using mobile devices. These stories can be saved and played back on the TV at any time via the Samsung Smart Hub.

You can learn more about the “virtual mirror” function in the “Kindergarten” and “Best Kids’ Song” applications: playing really makes kids become direct participants of the events on the screen. The built-in camera in Samsung Smart TVs makes you feel like a real participant in the action on the screen in real time. In “Kindergarten” kids learn vocabulary in an entertaining game form: each word corresponds to a dance movement. Heroes of the game dance on the left side of the screen, while children can see their dance moves on the right side of the screen. Kids can sing and dance to classic children’s tunes in the app “Kids’ Best Song” in the same way.

Samsung currently offers about 90 popular Smart TV apps for children, including “Pororo” and “Canimals. The company plans to release exactly the same number of new children’s apps by the end of 2012, including: video-on-demand content, quizzes, games, foreign language learning apps and interactive books for children.