My practicum is on ARIS. If you're unfamiliar with what it is exactly, ARIS is an iPhone app/networked game that sends its users on scavenger hunt-like tours. At each stop, the "tour guide" educates the listener. After playing around with it, a few questions came to mind.
1. Parents, legislators, and special interest groups have been increasingly worried about the activity levels of American children for the past two decades or so. Do you think interactive apps like ARIS could incorporate activity/going outside for kids who tend to favor gaming as an activity?
2. Is it realistic to think that ARIS, a free app, could make such an impact? Do you think it's a timely succession of consoles like Wii, which aims at incorporating physical activity? What kinds of changes or developments would be necessary to make it more accessible, appealing, and popular?
3. Can you think of other ways that locative technology has been/might be implemented as an activity for users?
I'm not sure how connected this really is to the ARIS application, but during your presentation I was reminded of something I had learned about years ago that is a similar locative technology based activity - "geocaching." My parents had heard about it from a friend, and we once tried it out for ourselves. From Wikipedia, geocaching is "an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a GPS receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name. Larger containers such as plastic storage containers or ammo boxes can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value." Geocaching isn't as high-tech or interactive as the tours on ARIS, and it isn't so much as of scavenger hunt because you only focus on finding one cache in a specific location, but I thought of it as kind-of a precursor to the ARIS games.
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