Connecting citizens with urban environments through an augmented reality pervasive game

The concept of Playable City situates games in public spaces to create connections between the citizens and the urban environment. To this end, Augmented Reality (AR) and pervasive technologies can provide additional information about urban objects or places and support innovative and engaging experiences to increase the user interest in the surrounding area. Understanding how these experiences affect the user interest is crucial for reaching a well-established connection between the people and the spaces around them. Our contribution is a preliminary framework to evaluate how being engaged in a playful activity improves interest and awareness in a specific urban area. The framework is based on the situated motivational affordances to establish a correlation among the users' motivations, the situation, and the employed technological artifact. We use an AR pervasive game to evaluate a playful historical experience as a technology probe. The results suggest that while playing the game, the citizens started to show a growing interest in the historical facts around them. At the same time, they began to raise concerns about other issues like sustainability, socio-environmental, and socioeconomic development.

Automated summary

The concept of Playable City combines games and public spaces to enhance the connection between citizens and the urban environment. With the use of Augmented Reality (AR) and pervasive technologies, additional information is provided to increase user interest in the surrounding area. This study introduces a preliminary framework to evaluate the impact of engaging in playful activities on user interest and awareness in a specific urban area. The results show that playing the AR game increased citizens' interest in the historical facts of the area and raised concerns about other issues like sustainability and socioeconomic development.