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 Inventor
Max Filin CEO
Inventors
Ilya Osipov
Ilya Osipov is a Russian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor. When he was a student, he took part in a national computer-science competition in 1996 and even got first place in programming. He is the author of 18 scientific publications on the topic of human-computer interactions and holds 4 patents.
As for the professional experience, he is well known as a founder and owner of one of the largest websites in Russian, NN.RU, which he later sold to the Hearst Corporation. He was also the co-founder, investor, mentor, and manager of several startup projects such as Numbuster, FedSP.com, etc.
As a hobby, he designs mechanical puzzles and you can even buy some of them in stores. He has received several nominations and awards as the World technology award’2018 for the WOWCube® system, Nob Yoshigahara puzzle design competition’2018 Auzzle A2 puzzle and in 2020 WOWCube® system became the prestigious Edison Award’s winner.
He relocated with his family to the USA in 2013. He lives in Novato, California with his wife and two children. In 2017, together with his son Savva they invented the WOWCube® Game System and he founded Cubios Inc. to develop his invention.
Savva Osipov
Savva Osipov is 15 years old. He was born in Russia in Nizhny Novgorod and when he was 9 he moved to the USA with his parents. He fluently speaks both English and Russian, reads, and writes in English and Russian.
At the age of 12, he brought the idea of the WOWCube® System. The idea came that it would be possible to connect the puzzle with an electronic device, make such a Rubik’s cube where a computer game would be possible on the surface, and you could control this game by twisting the edges of the cube.
Savva plays a significant role in the WOWCube® System development process. He participates in the events with the team where he provides great support as a speaker and brand ambassador.
He plans to go to one of the Universities in California but hasn't decided yet about the specialization. His hobbies are video-games, computers, games and computer technology history. He likes to print on a 3D printer and does some kind of electronic thing. Besides all this, he likes cooking and skateboarding.
How it was invented?
As Ilya Ospipov 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, Ilya V., and Evgeny Nikulchev. "WOWcube Puzzle: A Transreality Object of Mixed Reality." Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference. Springer, Cham, 2018.
Gamification Device Wowcube: Design And Program Environment IV Osipov, E Nikulchev, I Egoryshkin, S Orlov ICPE 2018-International Conference on Psychology and Education, 496-505 2018
Review puzzles and construction sets falling under the category of augmented reality games IV Osipov, E Nikulchev ITM Web of Conferences 18, 02003 3 2018
Cubios Transreality Puzzle as a Mixed Reality Object IV Osipov International Journal of Virtual and Augmented Reality (IJVAR) 1 (2), 1-17 4 2017
Transreality puzzle as new genres of entertainment technology IV Osipov arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03973 2017
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).
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. International Journal of Open Information Technologies, 8(3), 40-46.
