20 - Discovering Familiar Places

Summary

February 12, 2100: Walking down by the river’s shore it is hard to believe that as recently as a hundred years ago this bank of the river was dry land. Today all of this land is frequently under water as a result of increasingly wild weather events. Looking across the river you see the steady red light on the tower indicating that yet again, rain is in the forecast and people need to be ready to move to higher ground.

Traveling back a hundred years as a TimeLab researcher, you are surprised to learn that the risk of flooding was rather low in the past. Concerned for your family and friends, you think it would be great if the river didn’t have to rise – if this land could still be as dry as it was back then. Perhaps that is unrealistic and it is best to use this experience to prepare for still worse conditions in the future. But…perhaps it is possible that you can convince your ancestors to make a few small changes that will make your home in the year 2100 better.

This scenario is part of the experience that players have during the augmented reality (AR) game TimeLab 2100 developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of a series of research and development initiatives referred to as MITAR. The goal of MITAR is to provide experiences that merge the best of real and virtual in order to involve learners of all ages in games that are engaging, thought-provoking, and fun.

MITAR has its origins in a series of AR games developed at MIT and rooted in environmental science and public health. In games such as Environmental Detectives (Squire and Klopfer, 2007) and Mystery@MIT (Klopfer, 2008), players role-play as scientists, engineers, and other members of the scientific enterprise as they try to solve local environmental problems through active research. This research consists of interviewing virtual experts and witnesses, reviewing primary documents and background research, and using virtual sampling equipment to obtain readings for possible contaminants in the air, water, and soil. Since this game is AR, it takes place in real space such that if a player wants to interview the mayor, he or she would need to stand outside town hall to obtain that interview on his or her mobile device. If the player wants to take a reading of the bacteria in a lake, he or she would need to walk down to the shore of that lake to use his or her virtual sampling equipment.