Habitat – environmental mobile game

Habitat is an environmental mobile game. It's simple – just go for a walk, look for Character Cards and gain knowledge about famous people who lived before in the exact places of the city. It's an extraordinary way to learn about the past!

Habitat

Habitat is a game that I started working on while I was still a student, under the supervision of Dr Katarzyna Cichecka (UX/UI lab, UKEN, Krakow). I developed the project on my own later on.

The idea is simple: to create an educational application that will be engaging for users of diverse ages and motivate them to continue gaining important knowledge.

I noticed that every day (often without thinking about it) we walk the streets where people who have had a real impact on contemporary culture, art and engineering lived and worked. I assumed that the best way to get to know the city would be to remember these people in places associated with them – this is what Habitat is all about.

Following the example of the well-known Pokemon Go, we explore the city, but this time to learn about real history through the people who were once connected to these places.

The challenge was to keep it simple while providing valuable information. I reduced the gameplay to the basics: 1. Exploration with a map (with GPS); 2. Weekly challenge (for the region), 3. Related places (Found a Character Card? – there is a book, exhibition or film about it – this is an area for partnership cooperation); 4. Simple statistics and Card Collection.

The simplicity of functionality must also come with form – here I took inspiration from Microsoft Zune and gesture support. Ultimately, the application should be simple and pleasant to use, and visually unlike any other.

Open issues remain: cooperation with cultural and educational institutions (related to the characters in the exhibition, outdoor lessons based on gameplay), as well as further development of functionality and appropriate security for potential databases. Detailed information can be found in the attached Case Study document.

Habitat is an extraordinary yet very simple way to explore the place you live in. It can engage both users and cultural partners, while focusing on what really matters – preserving the past. That makes it unique.