Recover the childhood experience of playing in the street thanks to new technologies

The new technologies constitute an opportunity for minors to recover the urban experience of playing in the street.

Today technology has become an essential component of our urban environments. The city mediated by digital technology is a reality that interferes with everyday life and reveals other possible ways of life. Digitally augmented spaces emerge as backbone elements of these cities, using augmented reality to facilitate communication and interaction between digital and physical places.

Why not think of a city that is once again the place where boys and girls play and develop their physical and social skills? Faced with children’s leisure trends that encourage a sedentary lifestyle and other unhealthy habits, new technologies offer a way for children to fully recover the experience of playing in the street.

A study prepared by Yasaman Nekoui and Eduardo Roig, dissertation student and professor of the DOCA PhD program in Architectural Communication at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) in Spain, explores the technology of augmented reality as a strategy to reactivate public space for minors, providing them with a new way of interacting with their city and, consequently, fostering a feeling of attachment to the place.

Along with the theoretical approach, three case studies are presented that show how this technology is likely to promote the development of affective and cognitive skills related to children’s perception of urban space.

Playing in parks and other urban public spaces can be a very positive childhood experience. Augmented reality can intensify it in many cases. (Photo: NPS)

One of the purposes of the study has been to identify the opportunities of augmented reality for children as an interactive medium with their environment and the virtual world in the form of digitally augmented spaces. Augmented reality can be perceived by minors’ senses of touch, sight and hearing and allows them to see and/or hear beyond what already exists in the physical world. In addition, augmented reality can simulate physical entities for children in order to attract their attention, and engage in an exercise in imagination and cognitive interaction.

Augmented reality technology exhibits a capacity to generate hybrid contexts where the digital layer overlaps the physical medium. This scenario is offered to boys and girls as an opportunity to play outdoors, interact with the environment that surrounds them and advance in the cognitive learning of space through technologically mediated playful activities. Augmented reality can be conceived as a support for active videogames capable of building a more tangible city for minors and constituting, in itself, a medium that encourages and intensifies the subjective experience of the environment where it is installed.

Currently, augmented reality is consolidating as a tool that promotes the return to the urban space of many children who abandoned it while being held at home due to the sedentary lifestyle of video games on the Internet.

The use of augmented reality can promote the development of skills necessary for a mature interaction with the increasingly complex urban environment of cities. Through the addition of audiovisual content in digital format to physical spaces, this technology is positioned as an excellent interactive medium for minors outside their urban context to empathize with it. If the virtual reality promoted by telepresence has produced a bias due to technological imperative in the way of using the city, augmented reality could partially remedy this trend. Consumers of augmented reality games geolocated in the public space of the city are seeing a decrease in the practice of passive games at home. Boys and girls can connect with their urban environment in another way, explore the environment and create their own memories for themselves. Also, through the use of augmented reality, children can connect with their urban environment, explore the space and create their own memories that help them feel closer to their urban spaces. As a result, the quality of life for children can be improved and the identity of the city can be strengthened by using augmented reality in the city. Designers of digital and physical spaces can take into account the opportunities created by augmented reality to have a positive impact on the child and the identity of the spaces.

Finally, this study proposes some variables as a criterion or rubric to classify the genre of augmented reality games installed in a given urban context. Among the case studies examined, it can be concluded that Geocaching and Magical Park are examples of interest to promote children’s interaction with the place. Curiously, the same digital technology that in most cases hinders the activity of children outdoors and makes them stay at home, can be, in its fair measure, a tool that helps them discover new friends in the street and communicate better with your city. As part of the development of future research and as augmented reality spreads in urban environments, it is an opportunity to collect more information from children from different parts of the world about their experience of using augmented reality in the city.

The study is entitled “Affects in the city mediated by technology. The role of augmented reality games in childhood and the sense of attachment to place”. And it was published in the academic journal i2 Research and Innovation in Architecture and Territory. (Source: UPM)