Books are great tools to aiding learning and imagination, but is it possible to use technology in such a way that children might actually experience something like the African savannah for themselves? Savannah, a strategy-based adventure game mapping a virtual space onto a real one, was developed with just such an ambitious aim.

The understanding that game- and role-play can be effective educational tools has long been accepted, but in coming up with the idea of Savannah, a game in which a virtual space (the African savannah) would be mapped onto a real space (a Bristol school’s playing field), research and development organisation Futurelab aimed to take the concept to new levels, ones that would incorporate a number of new and unproven objectives.

As Jo Morrison, creative director at Futurelab explains: ‘We were very interested in whether the appealing and motivating aspects of computer gameplay could be harnessed and transposed into a mixed reality experience. The initial concept was developed in-house, then conversations took place with the BBC’s Natural History Unit and staff at Hewlett Packard working on the Mobile Bristol Initiative to see if they were interested in developing the notion of an augmented reality game where children collaborated when role-playing lions in a savannah.’

In the game, children move around a real space with GPS-linked PDAs, pretending to be a pride of lions which has to survive a year in the savannah. As they move around, the children/lions encounter hotspots where they can smell, hear and see objects (prey, predators etc) on their screens, and the computers link them to each other so that they can work together and communicate information both to each other and to an interactive whiteboard in ‘the den’ which monitors their progress.

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Space Invaders 2006 is an outdoor video game, developed by Evan Barba and Kuan Huang, that takes advantage of real world architecture spaces and transforms them into a game playground. Basically, the video game is projected onto a building. The player controls an aircraft by moving his/her body in the space to shoot down the invaders before they move off the building.

The invaders come out of the wall cracks and move down to the ground. The player has to move left or right to control the motion of the aircraft. Whenever the player jumps, the aircraft shoots out a bullet.

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Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilises the New York City grid to recreate the 1980’s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their “little world” of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger “real world” of street corners, and cities.

A player dressed as Pac-man will run around the Washington square park area of Manhattan while attempting to collect all of the virtual “dots” that run the length of the streets. Four players dressed as the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde will attempt to catch Pac-man before all of the dots are collected.

Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.

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CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

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ConQwest is a Big Game in the evolving tradition of B.U.G. (Big Urban Game) and Pac-Manhattan. The gameplay was designed by Frank Lantz, with help from Mattia Romeo. Dennis Crowley designed and built the semacode system, based on Simon Woodside’s original idea and code. The game was conceived of and directed by SS+K, Kevin Slavin, Liz Cioffi and others. The promotional agency AMP was responsible for all the on-site implementation.



Conceived of by Simon Woodside, semacodes are being used for the first time in the U.S. in Conqwest. Semacodes are two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned and decoded with a cameraphone.

Semacode stickers are placed around the city the morning of the event - some in plain sight (think street signs and store windows), others can only be found by interacting with people.

TAG Scripting Presence is a street activity in which participants ‘tag’ urban spaces using their mobile devices. This ephemeral graffiti projects is clearly similar to CitySpeak. A key difference is this project’s sentiment of competition, wherein participants challenge each other in a text messaging battle in order to have their tag become victorious. Another difference is the project’s roots in an anti-corporate response to the rejuvenation of Times Square in New York. The goal of the project is to reclaim, through digital tagging, this public space.

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Instant Drawing Machine is a good example of how art+technology can meet the man on the street. Oliver Halsman Rosenberg and Clint Taniguchi, who collaborate under the name Crust and Dirt, draw very playful images following the wishes requested via webcam from passersby in cities across the world.

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