By Cody Pallo
I love the concept of making games as art or educational games in general. Stimulating real world results with game based media can be tricky though. People don't always retain the sentiments they have right after playing these games and it's hard to get us to do things that don't seem initially fun. Games can be powerful though. With AR/VR, there are certain tools and mechanics that can provide us ways to hack our experiences, allowing us to compartmentalize and organize our thoughts during and after the event.
There is an interaction method which uses eye tracking and AI to detect what a user is looking at when they are wearing AR glasses. It can identify objects in the real world, highlight them and provide contextual information about them. You can then select, copy, paste, and manipulate related text, images, videos and 3D models it provides on demand as points of reference while we’re say, walking along and looking around or talking to someone.
Imagine a live 3D voice bubble of what someone is saying next to their head while they’re talking, say you don’t understand a word within it, you could look at it, select just that word, and then with a contextual menu; Google, define or translate it if you like. This could have video game potential and game studios wouldn’t need the AI component in a game, just the eye tracking will do, developers can code the info all in manually.
Say you’re walking on a trail with a botanist and you’re a plant enthusiast. Imagine looking at plants along the way and capturing and retrieving 3D models of them. Say you also create an empty room floating in space as a 3D container and you copy and paste all the models you are curious about into this general collection area. Then later you make the rooms larger or smaller, drag and drop flowers, ferns, and trees into three separate new rooms.
Now imagine organizing those plants with text you complied while discussing these plants while you were walking. Imagine the rooms, the plants, and the text can all being capable of being nodes in a mind map which you can then sort and reorder in 3D space in front of or all around you. You could drag, cut, copy, and paste them every which way until you come to a some sort of revelation. In a game this would help players interact on really profound levels. The more you engage freely, the more you learn.