ExplorAI encourages young adults to explore and discover their surroundings through completing quests. ExplorAI allows you to involve your friends, as it lets you play against them and see who will be the next leader in your community.
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The goal of ExploreAI is to motivate people to go outside and explore new areas through playful interaction, as most of us used to do as a child. We want people to become more familiar with their nearby surroundings and hope that by increasing the connection between humans and nature, people cherish and care more for the planet.
Video of the concept
How to play?
Game Set-Up
To start a game, users have to open the app and chose the duration of the game and with who they want to play it.
Choosing your competitors
This game can be played in three different ways. You can choose to battle against your friends individually or team up and battle against another team. When you don?t have any friends to play with you can start an open game. The system will find strangers around you to play with and maybe you even find new friends while playing!
Choosing game duration
The game?s duration can influence the character of the game. A short game will increase the time pressure, while a longer game allows for a more tactical approach. Therefore players can choose how long they want to play. A game duration can start from one hour up to a month.
Navigation ? ? ?
A big aspect of this game is the way users should navigate through their environment. The game consists of two navigation tools helping users to find the designated locations.
Game map
The first navigation tool is the game map (figure 1) created by AI on the phone. It shows the locations of the points of interest, marked with a question mark.
At the start of the game, the map will only show a few points as question marks, and these question marks are indented as starting points for the players. During the game, players will reveal more quests around them. These points will already show their quest type and be visible to all the players playing. The map will also indicate how people have been exploring by drawing the area that they have revealed.
Figure 1. Game Map created by AI on the phone
Wearable compass
The time of players? phone screens is limited while playing the game. Therefore we have implemented another form of navigation support in the form of a compass bar?figure 2). Players would dress it up on their wrists and ankles.
Figure 2. The wearable compass
When traveling through an area, icons will appear on the compass bar (See the Gif). The center of the navigation bar represents the direction you are facing. The main cardinal directions are indicated with an N, W, S, or E. The bar also shows the compass bearing of non-focused points of interest close by you, in a range of 500 meters.
Gif. How the wearable compass works.
It also indicates the distance by giving the player a feeling of small heartbeat with a large interval when far away from the focused point, when moving closer the heartbeat will be more present and frequent. When really close to a non-focused point this rapid heartbeat will also appear.
Quests
As the goal of the game is to end up with the most points, it is quite important to have enough interesting options to earn these. On the map, the points of interest are marked with a question mark (figure 3). This indicates that there is a quest available at that location.
Physical quests (figure 3)
The physical quests invite participants to become more active by giving them physical challenges which could be performed at a certain location. These quests are dynamic, meaning that others can overtake them by executing the physical challenges more successfully.
We believe that in order to protect the environment, we first need to get to know it. Therefore, we have created some quiz quests where the answers to the questions can be found at a certain location.
When someone is within 10 meters range of a point of interest, the type of quest will be revealed on the map and the question mark transforms into the representing icon.
AI would assess how players finish the quest and give them awards.
A question mark
Physical quests
Environmental quests
Knowledge quests
Figure 3. How icons show for different quests.
Want to play with our app? ?????
There are some interfaces of the app. You could experience interfaces during playing games.
First, we wanted to create a community where explorers all over the world could share their experiences with each other. (See wk3.06_13_Storytime) This concept aims to create a community feeling and make people more aware of the wonders around them.
Based on it, we thought about tasks that motivated people to go outsides and explore the environment. The first concept was to find insects around them (See wk3.07_13_Discover insects). And then, we tested the effects to call people to realize the environment by using lights to visualize the rising level of the ocean (See wk3.08_13_Wet Pants). After that, we wrote one Quest Log page to record all types of quests we wanted to use in our concept.
Feedback on these concepts helped us decide how to play; we also needed inspiration on the rewards of finishing tasks successfully. Then we created wk3.09_13_Enhancing your clothing. The product could be gamified to inspire users to collect tokens, which could be redeemed to create a unique look for their jacket, thus recording and displaying their "prize." So, instead of the clothes being 'worn-out,' they will be enhanced the more people use them.
An overview of the ExplorAI?swk3.03_13_Communication wearing gloveswk3.04_13_O?Neill pro skierwk3.06_13_Storytimewk3.08_13_Wet Pantswk3.07_13_Discover insectswk3.09_13_Enhancing your clothing
KristinCaspar KrijgsmanIris de LangeJiayi
Ianus Keller
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