Aurasma (was Re: [ARISGAMES] TaleBlazer by MIT)
Audrey
http://go.uvm.edu/mntjq
And Mark Olofson and I presented on the tool at a conference last November, which he captured here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxNZEaPJofY
Awesome Denise! It's great to hear from someone with some real experience. I got stuck at the blocks language myself. In the short time I had, I couldn't quite figure out how to make anything beyond a basic tour. I'm also curious about how deployment ends up working. How do you make it so others can play your game?While we're talking about other platforms, there are a couple others I end up hearing about that people might want to take a look at. I'd love it if there was enough experience around these tools to share because it feels hard to get information that goes beyond ad copy and actually gets to how they are used and who they are appropriate for.Aurasma - I hear about this one often. I haven't used it but I hear it is pretty basic but easy to use and cross platform. If all you have is a tour made of plaques in ARIS, from what I hear Aurasma could do that.Ushahidi - This one is interesting because it was started as a platform for promoting human rights and only later was opened up for general use. I also have not used this one, but the feeling I get is that it's closer to the ARIS Notebook. You create a collection that people can add to from their devices and that you can later consider together.Junaio - I think this one is a bit more techie. It allows you to overlay information that has a geographical component, like tweets, onto an AR space or do AR visualization apparently. It also looks to be a bit more advertising and corporate focused - a flashy effect for wow factor.SCVNGR - This one has been around for a while and I think of as customizable Foursquare on Steroids. It too is mostly focused on being incorporated with marketing of things like restaurants, but I know many educational organizations who have used it to develop marketing as well. It has more verbs than foursquare, and you can set up challenges made of many activities at the locations you decide.GPS Mission - Think about this as halfway between geocaching and ARIS. You make missions on the web and then there's an app for the iPhone to play them. The verbs are pretty basic. I just tried to go to their editor and received a "out of order" message. I don't know if this is temporary of if the service is gone. They mention playground maker, but I can't find that either.Traveler - Made at Ball State to facilitate field studies for Architecture and Design, this Android app lets you track your trip and add media to that track.App Inventor - Another MIT creation. This is an android app development platform based on blocks. Not specifically AR, but mobile.NoTours - Android, Audio tours and editor. Fred and Veronica in Spain have been combining this with ARIS for a while now. Since it's open source and the idea is heat I know that we've been wanting to get that kind of functionality in ARIS for a while now.Anyone have experience that they want to share? What other tools or combinations are you using and to what end? While we're at it, what are you using ARIS for?Chris--On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Denise Bressler <dmb...@lehigh.edu> wrote:
Someone started this thread recently and I figured I would contribute since I do have hands-on experience with TaleBlazer. A little over a year ago, I actually built a small game with it. I was lucky enough to attend Josh Sheldon's session on TaleBlazer at GLS 8.0, kept in touch with him afterwards, and got to go to an invitation-only demo day at MIT in Oct 2012.
TaleBlazer wants to be a tool that enables students to learn game design. The TaleBlazer interface offers designers a lot of options for game mechanics (see image). Using the “Player” tab allows the designer to create roles for the players; there is no parallel in ARIS for the Player tab since ARIS does not enable designers to allocate roles to players. The “Agents” tab is where the characters and content of the game are created. Agents are kind of like the choice of plaque, character, inventory item, etc. in ARIS. The drop-down menu that says “Control” houses a suite of scripts for operations, gameplay, movement, and looks. In ARIS you gain some of this functionality by working with the HTML tags within the character conversations and you also can gamify some interactions by working with the options on the map. But TaleBlazer gives more game mechanics… cause that's their niche.
ARIS and TaleBlazer seem to be fulfilling different niches. ARIS is about creating place-based interactive stories. The experiences you create can certainly feel like games but the emphasis has been on the map. The PLACE. You create things and drag them to the map. Then...Poof...you've got something you can interact with immediately. It's extremely great for prototyping ideas. TaleBlazer offers more actual game mechanics and since the emphasis is so much on the programming you feel inclined to use the suite of tools. You also have got to do some programming to really create something worth using. ARIS allows the non-programmers to create wonderful things without getting too much into "coding."
Getting started with the platforms... When I first started with ARIS, I was up and running and building my game quickly. You can literally have something made in a few minutes and start interacting with it on your device a few minutes later. It took more time to get going with TaleBlazer. I had only a very general understanding of block-based programming and had never programmed in Scratch so I struggled to get going with TaleBlazer. That being said - you can take other people's code and repurpose it for yourself so most of my game with just modifying what someone else did, rather than building something entirely from nothing. All my ARIS work has been my own; I've always started from nothing and built everything so I am intimately familiar with all the functionality of my games.
Advantage ARIS: Indoor functionality
Being the person who mostly makes QR code games with ARIS - the big difference for me was that TaleBlazer did not have this functionality. There really was no convenient and intuitive way to use TaleBlazer indoors - or far that matter - FreshAiR (R.I.P.)
Advantage TaleBlazer: Roles
I'll second Chris's statement about roles - ROLES are a big part of TaleBlazer. If you want your players to have interdependent roles, TaleBlazer builds in that functionality quite nicely. [Sorry ARIS, you know I love you! And I still use my workarounds so that my players can have roles. :)]
Another interesting advantage of TaleBlazer - perhaps for classroom implementation - is it's similarity with Scratch. If kids are proficient with Scratch they will have a big leg up. There is direct learning transfer from Scratch to TaleBlazer.
Overall, I think there are strengths to both platforms - you just need to have some idea in your head about what type of experience you are looking to create and use the platform that offers the most affordances. It's kind of like Prezi and Powerpoint. They are both great presentation tools but how I want to build my presentation and what type of impact I am going for dictate which tool I use to build my presentations.
Hope this was helpful - feel free to send along questions.
-Denise
On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 6:01 PM, Christopher Holden <chris.l...@gmail.com> wrote:I've played around with it a bit, but haven't really had the time figure out how to make a game with it yet. Several of us used MIT's previous AR platform for years before ARIS was around. You can still see a lot of it in Taleblazer. I applied via their website and they were happy to send me a login. I'd be curious to know if that's just because I had a connection or if they are willing to let many others give it a go (also this was the summer of 2012). I do keep hoping to see it released generally.There are a lot of similarities to ARIS. Some quick differences I know of:
- Role based. While you can make different player roles in ARIS games, Taleblazer assumes you want to have them, making it rather easy.
- Simulation. Taleblazer allows authors to script events using a blocks language (similar to Scrtch), so it may perhaps be easier to make simulation-type structures within those games than in ARIS which starts from a storytelling metaphor.
- Confined map. You can set the boundary of a GPS map in Taleblazer, making it easier to confine a game to a specific area and have your player realize it.
I too would love to hear from people using this. It's unlikely I can find the time any time soon unless others have paved the way a bit.--On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Michael Kasumovic <michael....@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,--
I just recently found out about a new AR tool called TaleBlazer put together by the MIT group. Currently it's in closed beta, but it's going to work on both Android and iOS. I was wondering if anyone in the Aris community has given it a try to see how it compares.
Cheers,
Mike
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