We Make Money Not Art: Backseat Playground , developed by John Paul Bichard, Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a car. This augmented reality game uses a digital compass and a GPS-receiver to connect the game to the passing landscape. By aiming the device towards objects, players can defend themselves against creatures or pick up magic artefacts.
Back Seat Gaming [We Make Money Not Art]
(Visited 13 times, 1 visits today)
More info in an email from the developers (John Paul Bichard, Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin):
Backseat Playground is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a
car.
We are looking at 4 core areas:
1 Episodic Narratives – a way of building narratives that work as fragmented and incomplete episodes, informing an overall plot depending on the journey travelled – this will be combined with both on and offline non-plot actions that will encourage players to further explore their environment and the in-game objects and stories.
2 Real World Game Engine – where the game engine is embedded in the ‘real’ – using GIS database objects as game objects and assigning game properties to these real objects. This will allow objects in the real world to function as game objects with multiple properties i.e. ability
to combine objects, to query them, affect the narrative and allow the player to collect resources from the real environment.
3 De-focusing technology – how to turn the player’s attention away from the small screen and onto their everyday surroundings through the use of lightweight mobile devices (subtly enhanced).
4 Fuzzy Learning – to encourage kids to enquire about and explore their environments, local history and geography through ‘real world’ gameplay.
(Thanks, John!)