Augmented reality marketed to children and teens will be very big business – but what are the consequences?
VIRTUAL & AUGMENTED REALITIES
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28 SEPTEMBER
08:30 – 11:30AM
Coming to life in another medium
Whether or not augmented reality will impair or improve childhood will strike some as a false dichotomy, a wrong way to approach the issue. Why can’t some of it be good and some of it be detrimental? Like everything else in life?
True, it can – but the point of raising the question is to get us thinking about how augmented reaöity will affect the experience of growing up in general – whether a lot of the gadgets and hyped games aren’t more distracting, incapacitating and ultimately harmful to our children’s’ development.
Take iPad app Osmo Monster. A child attaches an iPad to a white board and is encouraged by a cuddly bear to draw things that the bear will then use and play around with in a set of animations.
At first look this seems pretty great and interactive: the child is doing something artistic and seeing its creation come to life in another medium.
Caught in someone else’s narrative
But let’s try to remember what would’ve happened, what used to happen with our drawings and our creations, before we were asked to add them to mildly interactive computer-apps:
- We used to draw again and again until we had filled a whole pad
- We used to copy drawings from books and magazines and perfect them until we were as good as the original artists
- We used to cut out our drawings and paste them to card-board and dramatise entire villages of creatures where we were the one and only director, art-director, props department, stylists and set-designers.
When a drawing of ours is immediately co-opted by a game, it will feel fun for a bit, the novelty value will be great, but after a while the child will be caught in the narrative of the game. The game sets the boundaries for what can happen next.
Previously only our child’s imagination did.
Games and apps that are open-ended
The creators of Osmo Monster say to Fast Company that they’ll keep on refining and innovating what they’re doing. That’s good news.
And let me then offer a few ways I think augmented reality should be improved and designed for children:
- Create games and apps that are as open-ended as possible, that encourages the child to go further, even far beyond the eco-system of your game or app
- Create something that has a two-way component, where the child is encouraged to reconsider a previous action and to build on it if necessary
- Create something that can be picked apart and reassembled infinitely
- Don’t give the answers up too easily – make it hard, but fun work to really succeed
- Don’t create anything that is highly addictive
- Create something that doesn’t only rely on your standards or one standard, but can be lifted, saved, taken away and repurposed
- Let children be the perfect creative destroyers that they are
- Encourage their curiosity, don’t turn it off or give it an end-point.
- Don’t box the child’s imagination in, release it!
For a further look at how augmented reality is now changing the way we all play video games, I recommend this article over at the New Scientist.
Want to find out more about Virtual & Augmented Realities? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting on 28th September and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.