This is a video game that utilises the emerging technology of augmented reality (AR), which describes the interaction of a digital element as if it is really with you in person. In this particular case, this game involves the “Blue Plaques of London”, which are a series of plaques decorated on buildings throughout London that commemorate a historically significant person who lived or is somehow associated with the building. The video game also has the purpose of effecting social good by encouraging Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Goal 11 which is “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, in particular SDG 11.4 which is “Protect the world’s cultural and natural heritage”.

With the app, you hover your phone over a blue plaque in London and it creates a quiz game about the individual commemorated involved. Screenshots of the device are provided in the attached Github file. The app also utilises computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), which are subsets of the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, to function. One of the aims of the app is to help improve people’s contextual knowledge of the city they are in by understanding the historical figures who lived and breathed in it. This project has been submitted to Github and is open source so that other cities can take from it and extrapolate into the new world of augmented reality.