Last lesson we had our initial client meeting for our augmented reality (AR) school garden project and we were able to get a solid idea of what the client wants and why. Going into the meeting we only had the information “AR school garden game” which was really vague and made it difficult for us to research the required information. I made a blog covering this research that you can find here. For this meeting our team would be the interviewers, because of that we made our best effort to dress well and make our environment perfect for the client. For future reference we recorded the entire interview on a smart phone and we all took notes.
Most of our questions were answered on the uncorrupted version question which for us was “What exactly would you like us to make?”. Our client obviously had planned out what he was going to say and how he would explain it to us. Because of this we needed to put our previous research to work and make sure we could come up with valuable questions. Because our team is behind due to the meeting schedule, we didn’t want to get left behind in terms of information. If we had gone in and only asked the questions that we had at the time, we would have missed out on about 50% of the information we actually got.
We have found from this meeting that the application will be a serious game made for students between the grades of kindergarten and grade 12. The game will have a primary focus on education by using different learning techniques such as education theory. Because we have such a large age bracket to work with, and the games design can vary a lot given this range, we will need to come up with a method to either target the entire audience with different age brackets or just focus on a single age group. This project has the potential to be apart of students curriculum which is actually a bit nerve racking given the stakes.
For the AR part of the meeting we found that the purpose of using AR technology was to utilize the AR tag functionality which allows the users to scan tags that can call different actions in the app. In this games case the tags can prompt a particular minigame with respect to its location (eg. a minigame about saving water could be found at a tap). As for using the augmented reality and tracking space in order to place objects and such, he was pretty vague about it and it doesn’t seem to be his main focus. Mainly because there are constraints that limit its usability such as when it is raining or no access to some tags.
Because the game is aimed at children we are looking to make a more lighthearted and child friendly art style but also focusing on the realism of gardening practice. There will be a protagonist character that will be the players main source of guidance and information. We were informed by our client that children like to look up to older characters because that’s what they aim to be, because of this we are making the protagonist about 2 – 3 years older than the user.
Some of the topics to research after gathering all this information is pretty diverse. It is important to us to research these points because it will ensure our game is ethical and accurate with its information. Firstly our game will be part of a school curriculum and because of this their progress and data needs to be tracked for the teachers to grade them. We need to make sure that it is legal to track the information we need because it could be a big no-no. We have already been researching AR technology, but our client could have his vision of the app work with just QR codes. To ensure that the client can get the most out of AR technology and make the game more engaging for the children, we need to research further into AR to find out ways we can use it effectively for our design. Again with mobile development, we have already been looking into it but there are so many methods and opportunities for the mobile platform that could help us a lot.
Our client mentioned to us some new terms; design justification and design validation. On the surface it was easy enough to understand but just in case I think it’s worthwhile to follow up on this and make sure we understand exactly what he means by it. Another issue is that these AR tags will be spread out around a school campus and will need to have a lot of thought into how the pathing will work. We don’t have access to the particular school we will be testing this on, so for now getting some sample school site maps and creating a test path for our game is a good start.
The plan from here is primarily research and brainstorming. We already have some ideas floating around but we need to keep throwing ideas into the blender before we can get a clear vision that the team agrees on that we can then pitch to the client.
Caleb Middlebrook 