Wonderscope: The App that Combines AR with Child Learning
Wonderscope is a mobile app designed for young children to experience AR while learning. The app uses Augmented Reality (AR) to transform the physical space around its users into an interactive, narrative adventure through the screen of a smartphone. The stories range from classics like Little Red Riding Hood to original stories. While the story plays out through AR animation, the user can speak and interact with the characters. For parents, technology use is usually something that is limited or unencouraged for their children. The idea of growing up in the digital age and what that should look like is new to most adults because of much it differentiates from when they were children. With all this unfamiliarity and exponential advancement, many questions if these technologies are good for us or harmful. Nicholas Carr in his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid, wrote about his fear that the internet is turning us into pancake people. “…as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr). Wonderscope challenges this idea that technology use is inherently harmful and claims its app is beneficial for children because it takes away the guilt of parents for letting their kids play on a phone. Wonderscope uses a quote on their web site’s homepage,
“What if you could give your child an iPad for an hour and not feel guilty about it?… an app that makes kids smile and feel confident as they read absolutely feels like a win.” (Vouge)
Wonderscope incorporates educational facts into its narrative, a technique similar to children’s books. Learning through apps is now generally accepted as a tool for adults, however, children’s use of similar technology is still widely feared or accompanied by skepticism. Wonderscope instead, encourages parents to embrace their child’s desire to use mobile devices and turn into a positive and educational experience.
“The future of storytelling is happening all around us — we just have to look through the right lens to see it.” (Variety Magazine)
Wonderscope blends the world of storytelling and AR together, opening an infinite amount of doors for what AR can do. The idea of AR has been around much longer than Wonderscope, however, in the past you needed special AR or VR devices like the Oculus to use them. Other AR storytelling is only POV (point of view) or looks unnatural and unimpressive with glitchy graphics or a disproportionate scale. Wonderscope is the first AR narrative experience I have found that is interactive, smartphone compatible, and aesthetically pleasing. The whole time I was doing the story, Sinclair Snakes, I have to say I was impressed and engaged. I am a 20-year-old student who has engaged with several VR experiences like the Oculus and ones at film festivals and I was still engaged and impressed while doing a story geared towards 6-year-olds. Sinclair Snakes is a story about an animated snake breaking into a museum and helping the museum worker catch him. You travel through the different wings of the museum with the guide and interact with the artifacts to learn about them and find the snake. The app listens to your voice to move through the storyline and generates different animations and sounds based on your movement and interactions. The characters also move and produce their interactions based on your physical location and engagement.
Even with all of Wonderscope’s impressive features, the idea of it being a beneficial form of education for children still provokes fear. In a study done by Erikson Institute, 72 percent of parents had concerns with technology use, particularly with screentime, but over half of the parents believe technology supports school readiness. They stated that parents trusted school teachers as a source for child learning. If most parents think technology has benefits why do parents still not trust technology? This type of fear is expected as every monumental shift in medium form has had hesitation and unacceptance accompany it. The shift from the codex to printed books was thought to make the written word less meaningful and international because it would create more books than one could read in their lifetime. However, most people don’t believe that printed books have negatively impacted us. This is because we had into encounter a cultural transition with the medium transition that shifted our judgment on the new medium.
This type of shift is what is similar to what shift is going on now from printed books and resources to digital forms. There still needs to be a cultural shift that allows us to accept and organize digital mediums and its apps like Wonderscope that are aiding this transition; the consideration of digital forms to be respected and valued.
Wonderscope is highly rated across platforms. Many reviewers point out the idea that Wondescope allows kids to be absorbed into the digital world it creates without being cut off from the outside world. This idea highlights a typical fear that technology closes us off from the ‘outside world.’ Wonderscope debunks this idea, proving that it can be an immersive, entertaining medium while still being inclusive to the non-digital world. While the capabilities of AR and VR are continuing to be explored, tools like Wonderscope organize their place in the world to be both accepting of current cultural and current digital desire. Future apps that share the same characteristics will further aide the transition towards the mass consumption of Augmented Reality into both practical and everyday implications with will in turn lead to heavy cultural shifts.
