Electric Agents: Combining Collaborative Mobile Augmented Reality and Web-Based Video to Reinvent Interactive Television

Electric Agents is a transmedia game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. A typical-looking educational television show transforms into an interactive game in which children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect vocabulary words that are missing from the show. The players return the words to the show by throwing them back into the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a linear video narrative and an interactive game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play with vocabulary words. We describe the technical implementation to support this collaborative mobile augmented reality experience and report findings from a pilot user study. Results demonstrate patterns of collaborative activity, scaffolded learning, and parasocial relationships that have been linked in previous literature to educational benefits.