We are pleased to announce that Biba has officially launched it’s ‘at-home’ product for families! This new kit allows your kids to play Biba at home, using screens to keep them moving around the house instead of seated on the couch. The kit comes with Biba tags, stickers, a mission booklet and more. And as a bonus—the Biba tags work with our outdoor games as well!

Our Teletubbies Playground Pals app was recently written about as part of a series of games that can break the boredom bubble for families while outdoors. Check it out along with other titles at Gameskey here.

Biba is heading to the Big Apple! Speaking alongside other creatives in the digital outdoor space, Dr. Nis Bojin will be discussing current and future trends in children’s outdoor and physical play. If you are attending the Toy Fair be sure to come and check it out at 2:40pm, February 24th!

We are ecstatic, honoured and thrilled all at once to announce that Time Magazine has named us one of 2019’s Best Inventions in the category of ‘Parenting’. We are all the more driven to continue producing engaging, digital game-driven family physical fitness experiences in the years to come. Thanks Time Magazine!

We are happy to announce that our very own Byron Seef will be visiting ‘down under’ to give a talk about smart playgrounds and the power of play-driven data. PLA’s focus is on the importance of linking parks, open spaces and facilities to our health and well-being—subjects on which we have a lot to say! We’re looking forward to meeting our green-space colleagues at the conference.

Breaking news! We have just found out that Biba is a finalist for the 2019 Smart Cities Awards in Australia for one of our playground deployments in Perth. This is a very pleasant surprise and we are honoured to be at the forefront of the smart cities movement alongside a series of other fantastic companies/initiatives.

We are thrilled to be working alongside the good folks at Ronald McDonald House BC/Yukon to provide an installed game experience for the families that stay there! We will be launching the experience at RMH on Halloween alongside their annual scavenger hunt event with prizes for everyone who completes the game!

This year, we hosted our first data workshop at the NRPA conference alongside our partners, Dr. Deborah Cohen (RAND) and Dr. Russ Carson (PLAYCORE). With about 30 people in attendance from parks departments all over the U.S., we were excited to sit down and walk through the possibilities of what problems data can solve both now and in the future. Looking forward to next year!

Biba’s always proud of our record on ethical design and data handling—which is why our CEO, Matt Toner made the trip to speak about ethics and best practices in the children’s digital space!

One of the foremost researchers in parks and physical activity, Dr. Deborah Cohen, recently wrote an article for NRPA magazine which details the manner in which augmented reality is changing how parks and outdoor spaces are engaged with. In the article, she calls out Biba for a number of the positives it brings to the table—especially as it regards parent-child engagement. Thanks Dr. Cohen!

We are pleased and excited to announce the imminent release of Biba’s very first playground data white paper. Inside the pages of this document will be the analytics results of some of the first waves of data to come in from our over 300,000 Biba play sessions! Stay tuned for a release this September at the NRPA conference in Baltimore!

Biba’s Chief Product Officer, Dr. Nis Bojin, has just returned from Glasgow where he was part of the world’s largest gatherings of researchers focused on research and design for outdoor play. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (whew!) is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. It was exciting to be at the center of a venue where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in this burgeoning field.

The television industry tips its collective hat again to Biba’s smash playground game Hotel Transylvania: Hotel Havoc, as we were nominated for a prestigious Rockie award. Our team is honored to see our game once again on the stage with industry greats. To us, this means that the idea of our healthy second-screen alternative has genuine appeal for those in the industry looking for more positive ways to connect with their young audiences.

We were gobsmacked when Fast Company magazine named Biba one of the world’s Most Innovative Companies in their February issue! We’re in some amazingly good company. If you look at the categories and the hundreds of companies, it is an impressive survey of some incredible people making enormous strides in changing our world for the better. In our category, Games, we finished at #9 alongside industry giants like Epic, Sony and Rockstar Games. But we are unique in the category as we turn the video game experience on its head by being the only system where the screen is secondary!

For a small company like Biba, taking our offering to the world wouldn’t be possible without the help of some great partners. One of those has been Global Affairs Canada, an amazing resource for a small Vancouver-based company like ours - they have backed our play in cities as far afield as Dublin and Detroit, Singapore and Tel Aviv. We look forward to working with them as we continue to grow… after all, it’s a big world out there and play is a universal unifier.

Our summer smash playground game - Hotel Transylvania: Hotel Havoc - will be taking the stage alongside Barbie, SpongeBob Squarepants and other Nickelodeon hits. It’s always humbling to see that the industry believes Biba belongs alongside these greats - many thanks to all of our players for making this possible!

Biba took home gold at the 2018 NGAA Awards for the development and installation of Australia’s first Biba smart playground system at Kinkuna Park. Kinkuna Park was turned into a multi-sensory wonderland of active outdoor fun with the installation of Biba technology. The system facilitates the building a healthy, safe, vibrant, connected community and contributes to the City of Wanneroo achieving better quality of life and a more engaged community in Perth’s outer suburbs. Thank you NGAA!

We’re excited to announce that a new textbook published by Professor Krystina Castella, a foremost designer in the children’s space, includes Biba and its design process as a case study example spread in the book. Biba is alongside Lego and Leapfrog in exploring best design practices for children’s game and creative experiences.

We’re always honoured to be a kidSAFE member, they’re a great organization that has certified our mission is to get today’s screen-savvy kids back outdoors and active. receiving such certification was important to our team. Check out this blog interview to learn more about how we design for family friendly, data-driven experiences on the playground!

We love the NRPA event, and, year after year, we are impressed by the increasing sophistication of the questions we get concerning our smart playground solutions. But it’s a sign of the times: the NRPA’s own research shows that today’s parents are more and more inclined to view technology as part of a family fitness solution.