Baby Shapes
Visual, Audible, and Tactile Fun for Your Baby
One of the first things observed in newborns is their apparent fascination with areas of high visual contrast in their environment. Light fixtures, windows, and shadows on the wall seemingly fascinate a newborn leaving Mom and Dad wondering what baby is really looking at and seeing. In time some babies will even develop a preference for toys of a certain color, usually red, over other those of a different color.
Studies have confirmed these general observations by finding that infants reflexively prefer to look at high contrast areas, edges, and patterns as their immature eyes need time to develop accurate focusing ability. Black, white, and red are the colors easiest for a newborn to see and simple shapes are the easiest to focus upon.
Baby Shapes for the iPhone and iPod Touch displays 75 different high contrast images drawn with simple shapes in these high contrast colors to keep your baby entertained and help exercise the eye's focusing muscles at the same time. Individual images are displayed for a configurable amount of time ranging from 5 seconds to 5 minutes or simply tap the screen to go on to the next. Image transitions are performed with a clever animation in which each piece of an image first slides off screen and then slides back in to reassemble the new new picture. Optionally, animations can be disabled in which case a more subtle fade transition is used.
Tactile and Audible Stimulation Too
As baby grows and begins to interact more with the world he or she will expect more entertainment. To this end Baby Shapes includes several nifty animations and sound effects that are initiated when your baby bats at the screen. Flips and boings, twirls, and whirls, all help to keep baby entertained, occupied and, most importantly, happy. With each swipe the device will also vibrate (iPhone only) to help reinforce the notion that baby is in-charge and that his or her actions have a corresponding response on the device. Sound effect volume is controlled by your device's ringer volume control and all sound effects can be disabled if Mom or Dad would prefer to entertain baby in a less noisy manner.
