This gadget from Hong Kong wants to help you customize your life

Jackson Chan, one of the founders of Gyreo – that puzzling little gadget you see above – says that the idea for the device first came from Lego blocks. “[Lego] gave us the feeling of freedom to create anything we like without boundaries,” he told Tech in Asia. His team wanted to replicate that feeling for the modern digital citizen. Gyreo, they think, is the answer.

The name Gyreo is an acronym – “Giving You Real Extensive Options” – but it’s also an indicator of what Gyreo is. It’s essentially a portable six-axis gyroscope attached to a rechargeable battery and a Bluetooth 4.0 module, encased in a spherical shell with a single mechanical button. It’s small and lightweight, and that’s the point – you can attach it to anything and then use the motion data it’s capable of measuring for all kinds of customized projects. The company’s Kickstarter pitch video shows off some of the things the device could be useful for:

If you’re a developer, Gyreo is a playground – it’ll have an open source SDK for both iOS and Windows, allowing devs to pull the data they want and use it however they need. You could, for example, write some code that connects Gyreo with your phone and automatically starts playing music when you’re jogging and it senses the motion, then pauses when you stop. Or you could link it into your home’s smart hub and use it to control all kinds of lights and appliances with the button and with motion gestures, making it a kind of Bluetooth remote.

Even if you’re not a developer, Gyreo can be integrated with IFTTT, which even a cobe noob such as myself is capable of using. It will also come with an integrated app, but that looks to be pretty bare-bones at launch with only four functions: a counter, a remote camera trigger, a remote phone alarm snooze button, and a Bluetooth-link-broken alarm. Additional features, like a coin-flip feature, measuring tape functionality, a smart home remote, and more look like they’re coming later down the line.

If that sounds a little thin, it’s because Gyreo was conceived as more of a tool than a consumer-facing gadget. “When we first came up with the idea of Gyreo, it was more like a developer kit for programmer and apps builders,” Gyreo co-founder Jackson said. As the team – which has now grown to 18 people – continued to develop it, they realized it could be used even by non-programmer consumers, too.

The IFTTT integration is key to that. “For example, if you set the Gyreo as “IF” command on IFTTT, and link it to the Philips Hue [smart light] as “Then,” the Gyreo will be able to control the Hue,” Jackson said. “This setting will not require coding knowledge.”

Eventually, the Gyreo app will include this very cool light painting photo feature.

Kickstarting a dream

Because most of the team has been working in hardware and software development for years, Jackson says, developing the Gyreo and creating a viable product actually wasn’t that’s difficult. The biggest challenge the company faces, he said, is getting the word out.

That’s pretty evident from the device’s Kickstarter campaign. They Gyreo costs just US$35 – less if you snap up one of the early-bird Kickstarter specials still available. But with just over 20 days remaining, Gyreo has attracted less than 500 backers and is only about a quarter of the way to its roughly US$50,000 goal.

That isn’t a huge surprise – the company doesn’t seem to have gotten much in the way of media coverage. But in a way that’s a shame, because if you’re a developer or a tinkerer, this device seems pretty cool. I’m not sure that the baseline app functionality really warrants the price for the average consumer, but a creative mind and a little programming skill could make the Gyreo do some very cool things. If you want to pick one up, you can do so via Kickstarter. Or you can wait for the full launch, coming later this year in China, the US, the UK, Europe, and Australia.