Photo of the Petal assembly showing the camera inside of an orange, dome-shaped casing that attaches to one of the Petal’s flexible stems. Attached to another stem is a small, oval solar panel. Also shown is a universal clip and a spare flexible stem. The stems are white in color with stainless steel collared caps and they are surrounded by a light-yellow flexible casing. All of the items in the photo are labeled with text.

CES 2025: Wonder’s Nature-Inspired Camera, Petal

Allison interviews Franci Zidar, CEO of Wonder, about Petal, their new nature-inspired camera. Petal captures images of butterflies, bees, beetles, other insects, and small birds in your garden. It is constructed to look somewhat like a flower with a camera mounted in a colored dome-shaped casing at the end of a flexible stem. Also mounted on the stem is a small solar panel that powers the camera so no wiring is needed.

Petal captures nature photos in selectable wide-angle or close-up modes and transmits the images to your mobile device for storage, viewing, and identification on the Wonder app. The Petal stem, camera, and solar panel are easily moved to various positions in your garden or yard to capture different views.

Petal is complemented by Wonder Blocks which are small moveable planters that can be reconfigured as shelters to attract various types of insects. Wonder Blocks shelters and feeders can be configured for bees, butterflies, bugs, birds, and other small wildlife. A Petal combined with a Wonder Block creates a home for pollinators, providing the user with good opportunities to observe and capture nature.

Petal and Wonder Blocks are expected to first be released as a Kickstarter project in the spring of 2025.

Learn more at https://experiencewonder.com

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Transcript of Interview:

Allison: I’m in the Bird Buddy booth and I’m talking to Franci Zidar and I came up to this because I was expecting to talk about a bird feeder because everybody knows about the Bird Buddy bird feeder that shows you these fun videos and photos of the birds that are coming to your bird feeder. But you’re actually going to show us something new that you’re working on.

Franci Zidar: Yes, we’re trying to be fair to all life around the home, right, so not just birds. That’s why we’re launching Petal, which is a nature-inspired camera, solar-powered, goes into anywhere there’s nature around your home, right. Its beautiful images, videos, collects data, gives you insights, basically it kind of connects you with all the nature that’s around there.

Allison: Alright, so what he’s got in his hand looks like a little flower petal with a leaf and a camera, but the leaf looks to be solar.

Franci Zidar: Yeah, it’s detachable, it goes down, you can pop it up. So yeah, solar-powered, flower-designed, you can put it in the ground, you can actually hang it from a tree, this coils up so you can kind of wrap it around a branch, wherever there’s nature, like over there, yeah, wherever there’s nature, Petal goes, yeah.

Allison: So what gets the bug to come up to the screen, to the camera?

Franci Zidar: So there’s the other product that we’re launching, which is WonderBlox, and if you think about this as a device that captures all the beautiful wildlife, right, this is the stage for it. So this is a vertical system, modular, it creates like a, you can think of it like a planter pot that also includes bug hotels and butterfly feeders and bee hotels, and it’s really like an adult Lego for people that care about nature, right.

Allison: So these are fake plants, you would put real plants into this?

Franci Zidar: Not all of them are fake.

Allison: Okay, but you talk about like the bee hotel, what makes the bees want to come, or the butterfly hotel to come to that?

Franci Zidar: So the butterfly hotel has nectar on it, on a sponge, right, and that attracts butterflies, it also attracts hummingbirds, by the way, and then the bee hotel should have, what is it, bamboo shoots in it, but it doesn’t because we didn’t have them right now, but it’s like the bamboo shoots actually create like a beautiful habitat for wild bee.

Allison: This is so fun, so we’ve got this camera here, how is that connected to my network?

Franci Zidar: So that connects to Wi-Fi, and then there’s an app where everything kind of comes together, right, and there’s a couple different ways to interact, one is nature can reach out to you and it can send you like beautiful photos and images and highlights of the day, right, you can also engage with that nature and ask it things. So there’s AI in the background where it takes all of that input and you can ask it, how many bees have you had today, right, or do you need anything and it’ll tell you, I mean yeah, like I’ve not seen like birds a lot, so maybe you plant something else near me, right. So it’s kind of a two-way communication between nature and you.

Allison: And I believe the other woman we were talking to said that it’ll also go, parse through the photos it’s taken and only send you the good ones?

Franci Zidar: Yeah, so that’s something that we’ve really intentionally done with BirdBuddy as well, right, there’s a lot of action happening in any garden, any time of the day, right, so if we send you any motion, that’s going to be pretty overbearing, hit quickly, right, so we try to be selective of the stuff that we send out, yeah.

Allison: Okay, and this product in your hand is called Petal, is that correct?

Franci Zidar: So that’s Petal, yeah, Petal.

Allison: And the other product was the Wonder Blocks, which are the planters that you can get.

Franci Zidar: Yeah, the adult Lego, yeah.

Allison: Yeah, the adult Lego, there you go. And where would people go to find out more about this?

Franci Zidar: So Experience Wonder is the website, we’re launching these products on Kickstarter in the spring, with a target to launch end of the year or early 2026.

Allison: ExperienceWonder.com, and how much do you expect Petal to go for?

Franci Zidar: Sub 99, yeah, that’s the target.

Allison: Okay, and how about the Wonder Blocks?

Franci Zidar: That is TBD, yeah.

Allison: All right, well thank you very much, this is good, looks like a lot of fun, everybody’s talking about Bird Buddy so I had to stop by. Thank you, thank you.

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