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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
I still remember the first time I tried the kids edutainment system Osmo back in 2014: I was sitting in front of an iPad, placed vertically on a white iPad stand, that showed me pieces of a tangram puzzle, its squares and triangles arranged to make a shape.
In front of the iPad were matching wood puzzle pieces strewn across the table. I went to work to re-create the shape in question with those wood pieces. When I had managed to do so, the iPad played an animation and a sound, and showed me a new shape to crack.
This combination of digital and physical play felt like magic, especially because the physical side of it was so dead simple: In addition to the iPad and the custom white stand, Osmo only relied on analog objects — wood tangram pieces, as well as Scrabble-like letter and number tiles — forits various puzzles and other tasks. And all it took for Osmo’s apps to recognize these objects was a simple clip-on mirror that redirected the field of view of the iPad’s front-facing camera onto the table surface.
Osmo’s playful use of computer vision to bridge the physical and the digital world helped the company win over many millions of fans over the years, and ultimately led to a $120 million acquisition by India’s edutech giant Byju’s in 2019. Then, Byju’s imploded amid fraud accusations — and Osmo went down with the mothership, forced to shutter operations in 2024.
Now, a small group of former Omso employees is trying to bring its magic back: Together, they acquired Osmo’s IP and other assets for just $825,000 out of bankruptcy in December. Since then, they have been quietly restoring some of Osmo’s existing apps, and even started selling remaining hardware — all while brainstorming ways to take Osmo’s technology to the next level.
Two key members of the new Osmo team are Felix Hu and Ariel Zekelman, who met working on Osmo’s coding app, and have since married and become parents themselves. “Having kids just made us realize how special Osmo is and how there is nothing quite like it on the market,” Hu says. “We put so much love and energy into those products. We still want to see them thrive.”
“You don’t want to create these problematic play patterns. You don’t want to create addictive garbage.”
As parents, Zekelman and Hu also realized that the problems Osmo was trying to solve in 2014 — kids zoning out with screens and ignoring the world around them — have only gotten worse over the years. “I really want to create healthy relationships with the digital space,” Zekelman says. “I don’t want parents to feel like they can’t introduce technology to children. I think that we just need to be more responsible about it.”
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