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Willis Wee · · 2 min read

With a little imagination, this wearable device can turn your broom into a samurai sword.

Tokyo-based startup Moff is building a piece of wearable tech that lets kids play using their creativity and imagination.

Strapped onto a kid’s wrist and connected to the Moff mobile app via Bluetooth, Moff encourages the kid to play different roles, such as a samurai, tennis player, or a guitar-wielding rock star. 10 days into its Kickstarter campaign, Moff has already reached its $20,000 goal, raising close to $50,000.

(See: Indian wearable tech Smarty Ring successfully crowdfunded on Indiegogo)

The entrepreneurs behind Moff are Akinori Takahagi and Motohiro Yonesaka who met each other through a hackathon event. Akinori previously worked at Mercedes-Benz as a product manager of its sports cars. Motohiro was at IBM working as an IT specialist. The new startup was created in October 2013.

The founders were inspired to create Moff because kids nowadays tend to get bored with toys easily. So if there’s a “toy” that is evergreen, that would solve the problem.

A more active toy

Akinori also believes that kids today have limited physical exercise and imaginative fun due to PC and mobile games. “We would like to solve these problems and create a more active, imaginative, and ecological toy as the solution,” he says.

moff-sxsw-2014

The man in orange is Mr. Akinori Takahagi.

The Moff team was also at the recent SXSW 2014 where they demonstrated and received good feedback from its users.

Every kid enjoy and smile with Moff. They fight over our Moff and they said, “I wanna buy it! I wanna buy it!

(See: China’s top wearable tech startup nets $10 million in funding)

Akinori says that Moff has the backing of an angel investor who owns a public company in Japan, but declined to give details.

(Editing by Steven Millward)

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Community Writer

Willis Wee

Founder at Tech in Asia. Aspires to build a company and product that people love.