I had never heard of this, and the repo doesn't provide a lot of background ... it seems to be a handheld (!) pen with interactive point-for-audio features, for 2+ year-olds.
Here [1] is the Ravensburger product page in German and here [2] is some toy seller's page.
The pen's main function is to point at things in the TipToi books and its integrated speaker explains the thing being pointed at, or plays a song or whatever the book is about. There is a huge catalogue of books for e.g. learning names of things in the kitchen, at a farm, fairy tales and even languages etc. It's great stuff and works well
There are different models and the newest one has a record feature as well as wifi (for asset downloads, versions before need a download companion app on the PC/mac).
TL; DR: the tip of a pen has a sensor, the books have dot patterns overlaid on top of image areas, the patterns are decipherable into (hexa-)decimal code, and with a script file the codes do different actions (set a variable, play an audio file).
The biggest selling point of the pen for me is, that while it works with special kinds of books, the books are not tied to any account.
You can get a book from the library, buy a used one or borrow one from a friend, it will work with your pen.
This is so refreshingly different from all those subscription models, that I keep buying the books and once my kids grew out of them I know I can gift them away.
Note that while it seems that you need an account to download the audio files, this isn't actually the case. It's just the stupid UI on their web site that makes it look like that. If you find your way through that UI, you can get the audio files without logging in, and the pen announces itself to the host computer as a thumb drive -- just copy the files into the root directory.
As an immigrant father of 2 small children, living in Germany for the past few years, I have found that Germany has some real "hidden champions" amongst the tech-enabled learning products space. This Tip-toi product and associated ecosystem is one of them, and another is Tonies, which is a kind of audio player in a nice cushioned box that uses cartoon-like figures to choose which audio books to play.
Playmobil fits the bill as well. When I was a kid Playmobil and Lego were similarly popular and it was only much later that I learned that Lego is known everywhere but Playmobil is not. Playmobil is not as versatile as Lego but in my experience it is much better suited for outdoor play.
A more hidden champion is Ankersteine. I have one of their construction kits which is in my family probably since around 1885 and these kits are still produced today.
I just saw these Tonies at Target (USA) last night, it looks like that store got the exclusive distribution rights for the US. $99 for the starter box? Wow.
This used a much simpler device - basically it consisted of two electrical probes connected with a wire, one of them containing batteries and a light bulb, and it worked together with a board with contact pads with hidden interconnections. Then there were several sheets where you had to find the numbers in the picture corresponding to the labels printed along the right side of the sheet.
I also like the honesty of the text on the box saying that it's "electrical", when the temptation to (incorrectly) use "electronical" instead must have been great...
Entropia is the local chapter from Karlsruhe of the Chaos Computer Club. The Gulaschprogrammiernacht (GPN) is their local version of Congress located in HfG and ZKM, a college and a great museum.
The leapfrog stuff is what came to mind for me, I remember we had similar things when my kids were little. Honestly, they never seemed to work very well, but I assume the newer versions of such things are better.
Based on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4FUZcF_IC4 video LeapRader seems to use similar technology in the sense that they both are based on grid of points with offsets. Although at least by eye the timing/anchor dots don't seem to match the exact scheme described in TipToi reverse engineering repo. Also didn't see any obvious Sonix chips in LeapReader, at least in the teardown pictures I saw.
Looking at the Sonix website (the company providing camera+decoder chip solution used by TipToi) https://www.sonix.com.tw/category-en-956 they seem to have at least 6 generations of the code with varying amount of encoded bits.
they seem to describe slightly different variations of data encoding. Searching for Anoto (company that made one of the first patents) leads to a bunch more products using this technology.
List of 400+ patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US6548768B1/en#citedBy citing the Anoto 1999/2003 patent also gives a list of companies working on related products or technology. There are even some from LeapFrog but those seem to mostly cover practical application and UI aspects of a product using the optical position/code detection system.
Overall feels like Anoto is focusing more on a system which decodes the points into X/Y coordinates and covers whole page with contiguous pattern, but Sonix more on having codes which give specific ID although they also one version which gives XY position similar to Anoto. That might be partially a workaround to make the encoding schemes different enough not to infringe each others patents.
That doesn't really give a good answer to your question, but If I had to guess Leapfrog is probably buying their technology somewhere else possibly from Anoto.
There is also one similar product using Grolier name, which seems to use tech from Sonix just like TipToi so potentially compatible, at least the codes not necessarily the book format.
[+] [-] unwind|1 year ago|reply
Here [1] is the Ravensburger product page in German and here [2] is some toy seller's page.
[1]: https://www.ravensburger.de/de-DE/produkte/tiptoi
[2]: https://www.playpolis.com/ravensburger/tiptoi
[+] [-] ce4|1 year ago|reply
There are different models and the newest one has a record feature as well as wifi (for asset downloads, versions before need a download companion app on the PC/mac).
Edit: fix typos
[+] [-] netsharc|1 year ago|reply
https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/PEN-Optical-...
TL; DR: the tip of a pen has a sensor, the books have dot patterns overlaid on top of image areas, the patterns are decipherable into (hexa-)decimal code, and with a script file the codes do different actions (set a variable, play an audio file).
[+] [-] niemandhier|1 year ago|reply
You can get a book from the library, buy a used one or borrow one from a friend, it will work with your pen.
This is so refreshingly different from all those subscription models, that I keep buying the books and once my kids grew out of them I know I can gift them away.
[+] [-] moring|1 year ago|reply
At least that was the case 2-3 years ago.
[+] [-] globalise83|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Vespasian|1 year ago|reply
It's in german and I can't speak to the quality of the english translation which is available
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11993-toniebox_reverse_engineeri...
[+] [-] weinzierl|1 year ago|reply
A more hidden champion is Ankersteine. I have one of their construction kits which is in my family probably since around 1885 and these kits are still produced today.
[+] [-] peepee1982|1 year ago|reply
My children loved to listen on audio books on CDs (can be rented from libraries or bought for cheap) or on an old 1st gen iPod.
[+] [-] joezydeco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rob74|1 year ago|reply
This used a much simpler device - basically it consisted of two electrical probes connected with a wire, one of them containing batteries and a light bulb, and it worked together with a board with contact pads with hidden interconnections. Then there were several sheets where you had to find the numbers in the picture corresponding to the labels printed along the right side of the sheet.
I also like the honesty of the text on the box saying that it's "electrical", when the temptation to (incorrectly) use "electronical" instead must have been great...
[+] [-] peepee1982|1 year ago|reply
I had a Questron pen as a child and loved it, also made by Ravensburger.
[+] [-] amaurose|1 year ago|reply
IIRC, thats the video with the talking calculator demo...
[+] [-] xxmarkuski|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|1 year ago|reply
I was wondering if they are licensing the same technology base.
[+] [-] Suppafly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Karliss|1 year ago|reply
Looking at the Sonix website (the company providing camera+decoder chip solution used by TipToi) https://www.sonix.com.tw/category-en-956 they seem to have at least 6 generations of the code with varying amount of encoded bits.
Some of the related patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US6548768B1/en (Anoto ~1999/2003) https://patents.google.com/patent/US8061611B2/en (Canon ~2006/2011) https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070246547A1/en (Sonix ~2006/2009) https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614333B2/en (Sonix ~2015/2016)
they seem to describe slightly different variations of data encoding. Searching for Anoto (company that made one of the first patents) leads to a bunch more products using this technology. List of 400+ patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US6548768B1/en#citedBy citing the Anoto 1999/2003 patent also gives a list of companies working on related products or technology. There are even some from LeapFrog but those seem to mostly cover practical application and UI aspects of a product using the optical position/code detection system.
Overall feels like Anoto is focusing more on a system which decodes the points into X/Y coordinates and covers whole page with contiguous pattern, but Sonix more on having codes which give specific ID although they also one version which gives XY position similar to Anoto. That might be partially a workaround to make the encoding schemes different enough not to infringe each others patents.
That doesn't really give a good answer to your question, but If I had to guess Leapfrog is probably buying their technology somewhere else possibly from Anoto.
There is also one similar product using Grolier name, which seems to use tech from Sonix just like TipToi so potentially compatible, at least the codes not necessarily the book format.
[+] [-] reid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] croisillon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] croisillon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Suppafly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scary-size|1 year ago|reply