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Product Description
Product Description
The world's first Real Magic Wand
A dream come true
For thousands of years people have dreamt of using magic to conquer the world around them. Now at last The Wand Company has conjured up a real magic wand that brings that power within your grasp, letting you control things around the home with easily-mastered flicks of the wrist or swishes of the perfectly-formed tip of your Wand.
The Kymera Wand is the world's first buttonless, gesture-based infrared remote control. It can recognize 13 different movements or gestures and convert them into the infrared codes needed to control just about any piece of electronic equipment in your home that currently uses a traditional infrared remote control. Using a simple learning procedure, the Kymera Wand can learn up to 13 infrared (IR) codes from your existing remote controls and replay those IR codes when you make one of the 13 predefined movements or "gestures". Any button from a remote control can be assigned to each of the 13 gestures and there is no need for all the codes stored on the Wand to be learned from a single remote control.
What's in a name?
The word "Kymera" comes from the name given to a fabulous fire-breathing mythical beast called the Chimaera. With its lion's head and serpent's tail the Chimaera was a formidable mixture of different creatures. Thus the Kymera Wand gets its name from its curiously satisfying blend of ancient values and modern technology that makes it what it is, because hidden well beneath the seamless cloak of the lovingly-designed Victorian form, beats a electromechanical heart of pure sci-fi wizardry.
Serious high-tech delivers magical results
Small but clever circuitry
The Wand's amazing abilities come from a number of high-tech components packed into its slender body. Amongst these, four critical elements turn the pretty stick into a magical piece of electronics. A tiny micro-electro-mechanical accelerometer (or MEMS) device, sensitive enough to measure the force of gravity, senses the movement of the Wand in three axes; up and down, side to side and backwards and forwards; a microprocessor to monitor the output of the accelerometer and apply special algorithms to the output to determine if the movement of the Wand is one of the 13 predefined gestures; an infrared code learning and playback integrated circuit (IC) that remembers the codes of the remotes you teach it; and a miniature vibration motor that beats like a tiny heart.
It always knows which way is up
The Kymera Wand is clever, and as you would expect with a magic wand, it always knows which way is up, adjusting its view of the world continuously so that however you turn, twist or flick it, or whichever way you pick it up, a flick to the left (for example) is always recognized as a flick to the left. The Wand also tells you what it is doing by pulsing with gentle heartbeats in your hand. This means that once you have learned its ways, no one else need know how you are communicating with the Wand and using it to control the things around you. It discreetly pulses giving you haptic feedback as to what gestures you have done and whether or not it has sent an infrared code.
The Kymera Wand is luxuriously presented
A really wizard gift
Perfectly weighted for balance in the hand, the Kymera Wand is both protected and displayed in a simply gorgeous silken-lined presentation box, covered with black faux-dragonhide. The Wand itself is made from tough, resilient ABS that has been treated to over 20 hand-finishing steps in order to give it an antique appearance. The battery door is turned from a single piece of steel, polished and then nickel plated for a really high-quality lustre.
To complete the fantasy look and feel of the whole presentation, the Kymera Wand's manual is printed on a parchment-like paper and folds out as an attractive poster, 535mm x 360mm in size, designed to look like to pages from an antique manuscript.
Use your Wand to control stuff around the house
It is important to practice with the Kymera Wand
Before you can use your Wand, you will need to practice to make sure that you can do all the gestures correctly and then teach your Wand some codes from your existing remote controls. Practicing with the Wand is fun and easy, and a necessary part of getting used to the Kymera's gesture recognition technology. Unlike dreary press-button remote controls, the Kymera interprets your actions and so you must accurately perform one of 13 different gestures in order to get it to do what you want it to.
When you unpack the Wand and use it for the first time it is already in practice mode. The Kymera Wand has no lights so it tells you what it thinks you are doing by pulsing (vibrating) gently in your hand. In practice mode, the Wand will pulse a different number of times for each gesture: you perform the gestures one at a time and after each gesture you count the number of pulses you feel. (For example, "flick up" is three pulses and "flick down" is four.) Most people only have to practise for a few minutes to get the hang of the Wand's gestures, which only require short, positive movements.
Once you have mastered all the gestures, you are ready to move on to programming the Wand, by teaching the infrared codes from your existing remote controls.
13 gestures will let you control iPods, TVs, DVD players, lights and much more
After the Wand has been programmed it will pulse only once for each gesture onto which a code has been learned, if that gesture is performed correctly. The Wand can learn remote control codes from a wide variety of household devices. In fact, almost anything that uses an infrared remote control can be controlled by the Kymera Wand (except for Bang & Olufsen equipment).
The Wand can also be used to control televisions, and the flick up and flick down gestures make for a fun, simple way to browse through the channels. Although it has only 13 gestures and therefore can only be programmed with 13 remote control codes, this is more than enough to get basic control and EPG navigation of your Sky+ set top box. There are even infrared remote control light switches and bulb holders (which have to be bought separately) which, when used in conjunction with the Wand, will enable you to control the lights in your house with a magical flourish of your Wand.
Product Description
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Customer Reviews
I am a fan of harry potter but not so much that I'll dress up as dumbledore and hang around outside book shops. I think everyone would love the ability to just flick a wand and get a result and this wonderful bit of kit allows you to do just that. As soon as you get your head around the way it works and memorise the different commands (which doesn't take long), you will feel giddy with that childish excitement the first time a command works.
Right, on to the technical stuff. The wand works by copying the infra red code from other remote controls, therefore you can use the wand to control pretty much anything that already uses a remote control (and assuming you have the original remote). The wand "learns" these codes in a very magical way, keeping with the theme. You have to point the wand at the remote and press the button you want to assign that function to a certain gesture of the wand. Just doing this is rather cool in itself.
In general the commands are fairly easy to get to grips with although you do have to get used to the right amount of pressure to use on the tapping motions.
Now, if I could give this product a 4.5 stars I would. There are only a few niggles and they are fairly minor:
1. It is expensive, especially since the inventors were rumbled on dragon's den saying that it only costs £10 to make
2. There aren't enough pre set gestures. There are 13 and it may just be my setup at home but I used all of these for just my TV and my sky box. It would have been nice to be able to control the DVD player too and have everything in one device but as it stands I have managed to assign all of the regularly used functions from 2 remotes into the wand so no need for lots of different remotes
3. The range of gestures is fairly limited (see the product description). The inventors did not make use of twirling actions and a variety of swishes, this would have added to the number of commands you could assign to the wand
4. The wand can be a bit twitchy if you're not careful i.e. you may just be putting the wand down and if you're not careful or if you jerk it too much, you may inadvertantly execute a command but this just takes getting used to to avoid
That's about it really! The appeal of this product is definitely in the fun area and it has most certainly delivered in this promise.
One word of warning though, if you have kids, impress upon them that this isn't a toy. It looks like one but it doesn't feel like one. Just picking it up you can tell it is a serious piece of tech and I wouldn't be confident that it would survive being thrown around the room too much!
Use this wand and you can make the simple act of turning on your tv make you feel like a kid again, grinning in wonder. Go on, buy it, you know you want to.
I will say however don't ask too much of it, it has 13 different commands so pick one... Read more
It's great fun to use and really works! Read more
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