The digital video game Backseat Playground (BSP) turns churches, bridges and other sights along the road into a fantasy land filled with virtual creatures and things.
Recently, the Interactive Instiute in Kista Science City outside Stockholm, presented a new prototype, with sound based interfaces, also with focus on the journey as its main resource.
This is a new breed of mobile games, that unlocks the play experience from the confines of a video screen and sites the game in the players everyday world.
Backseat Playground provides passengers and children in the backseat of cars with new entertainment in their everyday journeys. It provides you with story and game content that connects to the geographical world around you, improving the game experience, increasing fascination with the world outside the window and offers new ways of engaging with interactive story telling.
The game device recognizes its angle and tilt through a digital compass, as well as its geographical position by a GPS-receiver. The player has to attend to stories given at certain locations, and manipulate the direction of the device toward things they pass along the road, in order to make virtual objects appear on the screen.
- Our main challenge in designing BSP games has been to look at how episodes and events can be uncovered and constructed by the player by using a map database and link it to real world objects, explains Liselott Brunnberg, who is part of the BSP research team.
- I hope the gaming experience will stimulate children to involve themselves with all aspects of the journey – socially as well as culturally, she continues.
The Interactive Institute Stockholm is a non-profit, experimental IT-research institute that creates innovative results through combining art, design and technology. The Institute is owned by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS).
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