eVision: A Mobile Game to Improve Environmental Awareness

A significant part of the population is still not aware of the sustainability problems that our planet is facing, so it is important to inform the citizens while persuading them to change their behaviour and to acquire pro- environmental attitudes. The work presented in this paper describes an environmental scanner, named eVision, which combines augmented reality and mobile computing technologies to allow users to inspect their surroundings with their mobile devices in search for pollution sources. When detected, eVision provides users with additional information regarding those environmental threats and allows users to virtually eliminate them. eVision also works as an entertaining and persuasive game, incorporating a rewarding system and a virtual game character that interacts with the users and positively reinforces their pro-environmental actions. The paper also presents the user studies performed so far to evaluate the application’s usability and impact on the users’ environmental awareness and attitudes.