Shark in the Park
Geo AR Games is using Mixed Reality Motion Gaming to create immersive
digital worlds that gets kids off the couch and active outside!
People may have the necessary knowledge,skills, attitudes, and motivation to be physically active, but if they do not have access to the necessary opportunities, they may be restricted or prohibited from being active. Having access to places and opportunities for physical activity and knowing these opportunities exist is critical. Efforts to increase access may not lead to increased use unless community members are involved and aware of the efforts
-The CDC Guide to Strategies to Increase Physical Activity in the Community link
Currently most parks offer lile or no play opportubities for most people with special needs. The Park Apps Playstore will be
Curation (Testing of apps, sorting as to special needs ) could be done by organizations such as
More
and more, preteens avoid the playground altogether, choosing instead to
spend time indoors, most likely sitting in front of some kind of screen- Science of Play, Susan Solomon
A
senior who uses a wheelchair, asked me if I could let her know if
there were any inclusive playgrounds in NYC. I asked her to
define inclusive playground. She said a park that would have
activities for her to participate in. I could not think of many parks
in NYC that are inclusive for her as person with a
disability.
For this woman sitting in the park doing nothing is not inclusive, it
is for other people just not for her. My definition of inclusive is an
activity that YOU want to do. If you do not want to do an activityy it
is not inxclusive for you. Getting real world recreation equipment installed in a park is not an easy job.
If you can't beat them join them. The Park Inclusive Apps Store will curate Apps that
Recreation equipment is often stored in parks for the convenience of people participating in team sports.
W4 Street Basketball Courts
If you can have private lockers parks for team sports I think this creates a good precedence to have shared public lockers in parks that hold recreation equipment for people with special needs
I suspect this is already done in some locations, in an article on the ADA Jay Beckwith says the following...
Another solution is providing a “mini-adventure playground.”
This can be as simple as creating a designated area surrounded by a low
fence and placing a lockable storage area within this zone. To reduce
theft or vandalism, the storage can be chain link with a combination
padlock the combination to which is provided to parents who agree to
simple terms of use. Changing the combination periodically is a good
idea. Filling the storage with wooden boxes, planks, cable spools, and
other play-useful but low value items is all that is needed to complete
the package.
Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto is a fixed equipment playground billed as the countrys most inclusive. Why because it inclusive for both children and adults with special needs.
Flexible Recreation equipment
-is loose pieces of recreation equipment that are not permanently attached to the ground, walls or structures in a park Example List:
Lego blocks for autism
A bell ball for the visually impaired
are 2 examples of flexible equipment for people with special needs
Flexible recreation equipment for people with special needs need not be special, it often must just be available
Rockefeller Park in NYC was not designed as an inclusive park, however it was designed with a flexible recreation parkhouse.
I talked to the staff there and learned
-If sufficient demand they will add requested equipment
-People may donate equipment....what this means is that a family of a person with special needs, can donate a piece of equipment for use in the park, so they don't have to shelp it to the park constantly.
At the start of every school year, Diane Levin, an
education professor at Boston’s Wheelock College who teaches a course
called “Meaning and Development of Play,” has her students interview
people of different ages about how they used to play when they were
children. The results are not surprising: Every year, her students
report that interview subjects over age 50 played outside all day in big
groups of their peers, with a few toys (“maybe a ball”) and no adult
supervision. People between the ages of 20 and 40, who grew up in the
1980s, ‘90s, and early 2000s, watched a lot of television but still
played outside, often make-believe games inspired by TV shows and
movies.
For young people today, however, it’s a
different story. “They hardly play. If they do play it’s some TV script.
Very prescribed,” Levin said. “Even if they have friends over, it’s
often playing video games.” link
Unlike libraries that offer library goers thousands of loose parts (books/DVD's) to choose from most parks that I know offer park goers a dearth of recreation activities. Libraries are indoors Loose Parks.
Elsewhere I discuss ways to add "real" Loose Parts to these parks to make them more attractive to members of the community. Here are a number of virtual Loose Parts that can also meet that goal.
Smartphone based
Parks landscapers architects can create a combination of fixed
features and augmented reality features to create parks that will be
personalized in real time to most peoples requirements, no matter
what their ages or abilities...
Toys"R"Us TRU Magic - Alanah
Make NYC Your Gym/ Make NYC Your Park
Make Chelsea Your Art Gallery
This
would allow for Art walks for people who have Smartphones with GPS. By
setting routes along the trail of Link NYC kiosks, everyone will have WiFi for these walks.
-Set First Route up 8th Avenue
-Citybenches and parks will be part of this park
Art will be static for all and for those with augmented reality, will be more (see below)
Pokémon Go, for all its novelty and nostalgia and fun, was never meant
to be the pinnacle of AR gaming; it is simple and has little objective
aside from “catching ‘em all.” What Pokémon Go is, however, is one of
the first iterations of what will undeniably be many more AR games. If
done right, some say the technology Go introduced to the world could
bring back the kind of outdoor, creative, and social forms of play that
used to be the mainstay of childhood. Augmented reality, it stands to
reason, could revitalize the role of imagination in kids’ learning and
development.link
Allows
you to add images to real world locations that are visible to anyone
using the wallame application. A public space can be tagged with
augmented reality imges. A variation on Wallame could allow different
images to come up for different groups (older folks, kids, etc).
In a park with a tanble, parkgoers could choose the set of objects that
will populate the table. Recently I was in a public space with a chess
set on the table, I sat at the table and fellow at the next table asked
me do i play chess. I didn't however with a AR application that
matched chess players, a chess player at a Bronx park, could play with a
chess player in a Manhattan park.
Having recently seen Microsoft
Hololens and Magic Leap I see both of these mixed reality technologies as creating
tremendous opportunities to offer a single piece of recreation equipment
that can meet a far greater depth of recreation needs then any piece of fixed
equipment.
Microsoft Holovision
Magic Leap
Koski is a building blocks game that combines Lego, magnets, and
augmented reality in an engaging fashion that may eventually pull your
kids away from Pokémon Go.
The game — created by Václav Mlynář — uses wooden blocks, magnetic
discs, and an iPad app to allow players to create digital worlds with
features like trees, ladders, and waterfalls that characters can
interact with.
Giving someone a real gun like this to place a mixed reality gun on would be a more satisfying experience. By adding similar"unardorned" features to a space (swivel chair for captains chair etc) the mixed reality experience will be enhanced It turns out a Holodeck is a pretty huge investment
I bet in a few years an at-home experience will deliver powerful,
Holodeck-like experiences, at least from an audio/visual perspective.
But unless you’re a very rich person with some spare rooms you would
like to renovate as a VR funhouse, sensorial, immersive environments
like the one we went through today are only going to come from projects
like The Void. link
Our parks are the spare rooms that can become AR funhouses
Much
of the equipment will be real world recreation equipment things like
lego sets and guitars. But those are 20th century recreation objects.
paratransit for parks will transform 20th century fixed parks into 21st
century loose parks with concepts like Augmented Reality and hi
bandwith wifi gamiing.
Having recently seen Microsoft
Holovision and Magic Leap I see both of these technologies as creation
tremendous opportunities to offer a single piece of recreation equipment
that can meet far more recreation needs then any piece of fixed
equipment.
Microsoft Holovision
Magic Leap
Koski is a building blocks game that combines Lego, magnets, and
augmented reality in an engaging fashion that may eventually pull your
kids away from Pokémon Go.
The game — created by Václav Mlynář — uses wooden blocks, magnetic
discs, and an iPad app to allow players to create digital worlds with
features like trees, ladders, and waterfalls that characters can
interact with.
Augmented Reality Aert Shoes in parks and other Public Spaces
Make NYC Your Gym/ Make NYC Your Park/Make Chelsea Your Art Gallery
This would allow for Art walks for people who have Smartphones with GPS. By setting routs along the trail of Link NYC kiosks, everyone will have WiFI for these walks.
-Set First Route up 8th Avenue
Unified park System Plam
Citybenches and parks will be part of this park
Microsoft Holovision
Magic Leap
Pokémon Go, for all its novelty and nostalgia and fun, was never meant
to be the pinnacle of AR gaming; it is simple and has little objective
aside from “catching ‘em all.” What Pokémon Go is, however, is one of
the first iterations of what will undeniably be many more AR games. If
done right, some say the technology Go introduced to the world could
bring back the kind of outdoor, creative, and social forms of play that
used to be the mainstay of childhood. Augmented reality, it stands to
reason, could revitalize the role of imagination in kids’ learning and
development. link
Allows you to add images to real world locations that are visible to anyone using the wallame application. A public space can be tagged with augmented reality imges. A variation on Wallame could allow differemnt images to come up for different groups (older folks, kids, etc).
A park could have a table, parkgoers could choose the set of objects that will populate the table. Recently I was in a public space with a chess set on the table, I sat at the table and fellow at the next table asked me do i play chess. I didn't however with a AR application that matched chess players, a chess player at a bronxx park, could play with a chess player in a Manhattan park.
This could be done for other park structures too.
Project Tango
The raygun above is augmented reality, I doubt the person is holding anything, by giving them real world objects to hold the feel of the object will be enhanced...
By offering/building "blank" structures in a playspace like this a tactile sense can be added to augmented realities
