Hi, my name is John Martin, and I am a Learning Consultant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With a background in technology, art, writing, and outdoor education, and with a commitment to environmental and social sustainability, I investigate tools of inquiry and expression that promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the social and physical space(s) we inhabit.
Since 1993, I’ve helped run a wilderness camp in Maine, and there noticed that when people actively engage their bodies in personally and culturally meaningful physical places, they can learn a lot. Thus, I continue to work with mobile devices, including “light” Augmented Reality to physically and socially situate its layers in a culturally-meaningful (and geographically real) space.
Currently, I am helping to develop ARIS (Augmented Reality Interactive Storytelling), which is a mobile augmented reality platform designed for the Apple iPhone that allows simple and elegant creation of location-based mobile games. It’s pretty cool, and I wish I could take more credit for it than I can.
My dissertation was on the Mystery Trip — based on a theatrically-enhanced camping trip “played” at the camp in the 1920s and 1930s, where campers followed the trails of forgers, kidnappers, and thieves in the woods around the camp, finding clues, breaking codes, solving puzzles, and improvising in order to find the gold coins buried by the bad guys (then they’d peel the gold off the coins and eat the chocolate).
Now the clues and characters are virtual, triggered by GPS, but the space is largely the same. As a twist to the original game, in the down time of the three day period of the game, the players design a “better” game for the next group to go through. This additional step should help further ground them in the place as it requires that they look at the space they are passing through from the perspective of game designer/producers as well as consumers.
He invites you to check out his website.
