About

WOWCube® System

WOWCube system is the World’s first mixed-reality entertainment device that combines the best from classical 3D puzzle cube and video games and delivers an unprecedented immersive experience where virtual gameplay is controlled by physically tilting, twisting, and shaking the device.

It’s an interesting and exciting gadget with tons of games and features, like smartphones and consoles.

At the same time, it’s a Smart Educational platform for cognitive and motor to brain development for kids and the whole family designed to keep it far from the eyes thinking in 3 dimensions.

It is a stand-alone digital device that uses a Tangible interface and Mixed Reality to create an exciting development environment with unusual characteristics in which puzzle-like dynamic games can work.

Cubios Inc

Cubios Inc. is a company based in Novato, CA which focuses on hi-tech consumer robotic toys and entertainment game platforms design, development, marketing, and distribution. Cubios inc. was founded as an independent research, development, and manufacturing company focused on cutting-edge technologies. Cubios Studio is a game studio for Digital Apps & Widgets.

Ilya Osipov President&Founder

Savva Osipov Idea Creator, Evangelist

Semyon Orlov Chief Engineer. (Died as a result of unsuccessful heart surgery at the age of 38)

Max Filin CEO

Inventors

Initially, the idea of the product belongs to Savva Osipov and Ilya Osipov. Which were later joined by Semyon Orlov, Max Filin and other team members.

The idea was invented on September 10, 2016 and inspired by the products of Sifteo and Rubik's Cube

How it was invented?

As Ilya Osipov likes to say he has always loved 3D puzzles. One of the mechanical puzzles he developed won a global puzzle design competition prize.

The whole house was full of different puzzles, moreover, he was engaged in IT for many years, and he and his son Savva took part in a computer contest based on Arduino, and Raspberry Pi.

Ilya's son, Savva Osipov, who was 12 years old, gave the idea of the WOWCube® system.

Ilya and Savva discussed the idea of Sifteo, its concept, pros, and cons. Savva noticed that it would be more interesting to make screens not on separate cubes, but on a single Rubik’s cube. And thus the game characters could run from screen to screen. The way to control them would be the turns, as in the Rubik’s cube.

Ilya thought that even though it’s more difficult but it would definitely be more interesting. He considered the idea and decided that he could build such a device.

The most difficult part was the topology of the device. Not only did it need to rotate mechanically like a Rubik’s Cube, but it also needed to do so while supporting electrical and mathematical integrity.

• How to place microprocessors inside the device?

• How to make the parts understand their current relative position?

• How to provide data transfer and synchronize operations?

• How to make the environment work as a single device while performing distributed computing?

In the end, there are 8 processors in the device. All this required an unusual approach.

When Ilya wrote the first C++ program for an early prototype, he was literally dizzy.

It was necessary to create mapping matrices of the faces of different screens and to ensure their re-calculation after any rotation done by the user.

The first thing done was an analog of the game Digger. When the Digger began to successfully run from screen to screen, it became clear that the concept was right, and everything was feasible.

There was also a very big question of how to make reliable connections between the parts of the device.

Inspired by Apple’s MagSafe, Ilya designed magnetic connections with self-orientating magnetic contacts, which, unlike MagSafe’s male to female connections, had unisex connections. This allowed any part inside the cube to connect evenly and perfectly to each other, no matter how the cube is rotated. All these were just conceptual models.

They received practical implementation when the chief engineer, Semyon Orlov, joined the project. He applied Ilya's ideas in practice to finalize the prototype.

The idea came up in late 2016. Then it took time to analyze the idea. The first prototype based on Arduino was made in Spring 2017. It was printed on an in-house 3D printer just to prove the concept.

In total, 4 basic prototypes and dozens of variations were made.

Publications

Osipov, I. V. (2017). Cubios Transreality Puzzle as a Mixed Reality Object. In International Journal of Virtual and Augmented Reality (IJVAR), 1(2), 1-17.

Osipov, I. V. (2017). Transreality puzzle as new genres of entertainment technology. In arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03973.

Osipov, I. V., & Nikulchev, E. (2018, November). WOWCube Puzzle: A Transreality Object of Mixed Reality." In Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference. Springer, Cham.

Osipov, I. V., Nikulchev, E., Egoryshkin, I., & Orlov, S. (2018). Gamification Device Wowcube: Design And Program Environment. In ICPE 2018-International Conference on Psychology and Education (pp. 496-505).

Osipov, I. V., & Nikulchev, E. (2018). Review puzzles and construction sets falling under the category of augmented reality games. In In ITM Web of Conferences (Vol. 18, p. 02003). EDP Sciences.

Orlov, S. O., Egoryshkin, I. S., & Nikulchev, E. V. (2020). Development of a game application for a custom eight-processor device with a tangible interface. In International Journal of Open Information Technologies, 8(3), 40-46.