IRL PLAYground Toybox Demo — Hong Kong Toy Fair 2025

The Toybox Demo introduced IRL PLAYground to the global toy industry, showing how toys act as narrative anchors within an AI-enabled ecosystem of play.

At the Hong Kong Toy Fair 2025, IRL demonstrated how toys can be more than standalone products. Using photogrammetry and model training, the Toybox showed how objects become gateways into stories, ecologies, and systems.

Rethinking the Fair

Toy fairs often present playthings as isolated novelties. The Toybox Demo reframed toys as interfaces to complexity, embedding them within the PLAYground as part of a system that links schools, homes, and distributors.

Objects as Gateways

The demo presented an ecosystem of objects. KIN explored form, modularity, and systems thinking, teaching how structures combine and recombine. Our Home examined domestic infrastructures of care and labour, reframing the household as a site of play and learning. Produce Crayons connected to material ecologies, transforming waste into colour and grounding creativity in planetary cycles. Together, these toys were anchored by narrative devices and extended into digital space through AI-driven photogrammetry, producing adaptive story worlds within the PLAYground.

From Toys to Systems

The Toybox Demo positioned IRL not as a toy manufacturer, but as a systems builder, demonstrating how toys, AI, and learning can converge. By presenting at the Hong Kong Toy Fair — a hub of global distribution — IRL opened new pathways for partnerships and adoption, situating PLAYground as a platform for the future of play-based learning worldwide.