Pok 'emon Go has received unprecedented media coverage for a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques. The game has been commonly associated with greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and generally improving health, social, and security indices. However, the true impact of Pok 'emon Go on people's mobility patterns in a city is still largely unknown. In this paper we perform a natural experiment using data from mobile networks to evaluate the effect of Pok 'emon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago of Chile. We found a significant effect of Pok 'emon Go on the floating population of Santiago: up to 13.8 more people being outside at certain times, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects at specific times were found by performing several regressions using count models over snapshots of the cell phone network. The effect is significant after controlling for land use, daily patterns, and points of interest in the city. Particularly, we found that, in business days, there is more people on the street at commuting times, meaning that people did not change their daily routines but slightly adapted them to play the game. Conversely, on Saturday and Sunday night, people indeed went out to play to places nearby their homes. Even if the statistical effects of the game do not reflect the massive reach portrayed by the media, it still allowed the streets to become a new place for people to spend time in. This is important, because results like these are expected to inform long-term infrastructure investments by city officials, jointly with public policies aimed at, for example, stimulating pedestrian traffic or suggesting alternative routes. Our work supports the notion that location-based games like Pok 'emon Go have benefits for the life in the city.
Augmented Reality and Location-based Games The effects of augmented reality games and applications within the city have been anticipated for more than one decade @cite_41 @cite_49 . However, the limits in mainstream hardware have impeded their general implementation adoption at different times. Most studies about the impact of those games have been small-scale only @cite_24 . Even though smartphone technology has allowed location-based augmented reality games to become more commonplace in the last few years, until the launch of Pokémon Go, they still lacked the cultural impact needed to have a considerable effect on the city. As Frank Lantz is quoted in @cite_16 , in relation to the game PacManhattan: @cite_32 . Since as we discussed above, Pokémon is one of the most successful media franchises in the world @cite_1 , it enables the unique opportunity to study both, the impact of a location-based augmented reality game; and the effect of an intervention at the city scale when it comes to population mobility.
@cite_41 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_49 @cite_16
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While the knowledge economy has reshaped the world, schools lag behind in producing appropriate learning for this social change. Science education needs to prepare students for a future world in which multiple representations are the norm and adults are required to “think like scientists.” Location-based augmented reality games offer an opportunity to create a “post-progressive” pedagogy in which students are not only immersed in authentic scientific inquiry, but also required to perform in adult scientific discourses. This cross-case comparison as a component of a design-based research study investigates three cases (roughly 28 students total) where an Augmented Reality curriculum, Mad City Mystery, was used to support learning in environmental science. We investigate whether augmented reality games on handhelds can be used to engage students in scientific thinking (particularly argumentation), how game structures affect students’ thinking, the impact of role playing on learning, and the role of the physical environment in shaping learning. We argue that such games hold potential for engaging students in meaningful scientific argumentation. Through game play, players are required to develop narrative accounts of scientific phenomena, a process that requires them to develop and argue scientific explanations. We argue that specific game features scaffold this thinking process, creating supports for student thinking non-existent in most inquiry-based learning environments. Historically, the play of digital games in public was restricted to certain locations such as arcades and cybercafes. The proliferation of personal, mobile, and digitally networked devices, however, has contributed to the ubiquity of digital games in contemporary culture, making them available for play anywhere, any time. This paper uses two examples to examine this recent shift to consider how play and digital games can contribute to revitalising the urban experience. The first examines the experience of playing digital games in urban cybercafes; and the second discusses the recent popular location–based gaming app for the iPhone, Shadow Cities . By contrasting the types of play that unfold in the situated but highly contingent environments of the cybercafe and the ‘hybrid’ space Shadow Cities’ massively multiplayer world, this paper argues that the historical role of play as the foundation for a vibrant and progressive city life is increasingly at stake in the shift towards pervasive, software–mediated gaming applications. We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant: connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it, and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS. This paper presents a framework which allows urban planners to navigate and interact with large datasets fused with social feeds in real-time, enhanced by a virtual reality (VR) capability, which further promotes the knowledge discovery process and allows to interact with urban data in natural yet immersive way. A challenge in urban planning is making decisions based on datasets which are many times ambiguous, together with effective use of newly available yet unstructured sources of information like social media. Providing expert users with novel ways of representing knowledge can be beneficial for decision making. Game engines have evolved into capable testbeds for novel visualization and interaction techniques. We therefore explore the possibility of using a modern game engine as a platform for knowledge representation in urban planning and how it can be used to model ambiguity. We also investigate how urban planners can benefit from immersion when it comes to data exploration and knowledge discovery. We apply the concept of using primitives to publicly available transportation datasets and social feeds of New York city, we discuss a gesture-based VR extension of our framework and lastly, we conclude the paper with feedback from expert users in urban planning and with an outlook of future challenges.