Who says video games have to keep you sitting on the couch all day? Augmented reality games like Pokemon Go have the potential to get us moving, encountering places and people we might not have ever connected with otherwise. Kellian Adams Pletcher, an educational game designer and founder of Green Door Labs, explains how AR is going to have us interacting with our environment – and each other – in exciting new ways.
Three Takeaways
- Augmented reality makes you a part of the story. While it wasn’t the first AR game, Pokemon Go has been so successful because it allows people to engage with a fictional story that they’ve been invested in for years.
- Real world triggers can become part of a fictional story with AR technology. These can include particular locations, as in Pokemon Go, or certain objects, like in Adams Pletcher’s apps that bring museum paintings to life.
- Adams-Pletcher believes AR has the power to forge new relationships: “One thing I really think has changed is permission to approach strangers and our ability to connect with people in a group and our willingness to make friends with people we don’t know or that we don’t have anything in common with,” she says. “I think that these storylines - this technology - is giving that back to us.”
More Reading
- Kellian Adams-Pletcher talks about what educators can learn from the Pokemon Go phenomenon.
- HowStuffWorks on, well… how augmented reality works.
- Wired on why Snapchat’s new augmented reality glasses will fare better than Google’s now-discontinued attempt.
