Now that you've bought your kid a smartphone, a Denmark-based startup called Udu is hoping you'll buy their separate $120 game controller to pair with it.

The Udu Console is a handheld wand that controls gameplay on the phone, serving, for instance, as the handle of a sword, a baseball bat or a paintbrush.

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This seems like a step in the wrong direction. Seeing the kids in the video running around outside while staring into a screen is disturbing. Admittedly your kid can't cut orcs in half in real life, but throwing a real ball or painting with a real brush on a real canvas are relatively easy-to-access activities, no? What is the benefit of this object, beyond teaching children that the most fun in life is to be found on a screen? And why are the kids in the video even bothering to go outside, if all the action is on-screen?

The UDU Console is up on Kickstarter, with a relatively low sub-$20K target. At press time there was 35 days left to pledge and the target hadn't been met. I'll be curious to see how many people think this is a good idea.