Your kind Attention, please! The number of children that go missing every year is approx 800K and 77K in US and UK, respectively. To help purge the grimy stats, Professor Lizbeth Goodman, director of Smartlab Digital Media Institute at the University of East London is working on a project named Lost and Found for last few years to make a portable device that exploits GPS technology to track the missing/abducted kids.
The game acts while resting inside user’s mobile-phone. The technology using the GPS and mapping technology (to help track exact location of the lost kid) comes into action as he signs-up for alerts when someone goes missing in adjacent location. If the face of the kid conveyed matches to that of missing kid’s, and inform the authority so as to seek the lost kid, quickly.
I think, Professor got an idea from Peter Pan’s Lost Boys that also contains some lost and found trivia. Anyway, the new game indeed brings an essence of social responsibility to all the gamers.
What Lizbeth Goodman has to say about his underway project?
If it’s a project that sounds worthy, or that there are cops involved, or that you have to hand over personal data, people aren’t interested. But if we let them use an avatar, they’re ok with that. Participants can see their own input... achieving success in finding lost community members, and [it will] change the nature of play, and the sense of responsibility it entails.
The thing that sounds a bit outlandish is ‘change the nature of play......’ that I think will change the flavor of game to some extant, but I am damn sure that the clever idea will help lessening the growing number of missing kids to an lower level.
In concluding lines, Goodman’s new project is a step in the right direction to show the usability of games.
Via: slashdot
