Introduction
We worked alongside the Immergency team to create a collaborative game in AR that educates players on climate change policies, and the importance of working together to reduce our carbon emissions as part of a XR competition. Immergency wanted to recreate a virtual ‘escape room’ experience, where the user has to go through a series of puzzles and minigames to reach a goal, which in this case was lowering the CO2 levels before 2050.
What we did
To recreate the AR ‘escape room’ feeling, we created multiple different puzzles and minigames to be solved in a certain order to achieve the goal. As collaboration was an essential aspect to the story told in this game, we used Augmented Reality, as unlike Virtual Reality, AR is something most people can experience as long as they have a smartphone, making it much more accessible. Not only can anyone easily crowd around a phone and figure out puzzles together, but users can also join in on different devices, so more people can get involved. Companies like Apple are developing this collaboration between devices even further, so creating a game that could be developed more in the future was important to us.
To add structure we created ‘tiles’ that acted as our AR markers, but as well as serving different purposes within the game; the first tile was the ‘Town Hall’ where the user can return to after completing the puzzles, the CO2 emissions trajectory graph was projected above the Town Hall throughout the game to create a goal and motivate the user; we then had the ‘Energy Hub’, which is where the user could start the minigames and tasks.
The ‘Energy Hub’ tile contained three different minigames which all related to the use of sustainable energy sources. The prizes for these mini games were climate change policies that, when slotted in the town hall, lowered the CO2 emission levels. One of the minigames was spinning all three turbines fast enough to get a policy, which was not only fun and challenging, but it created a positive reaction from the user, rewarding the user when they spun all three fast enough, and reinforcing the idea that renewable energy is a good thing.
