Tendar

Our smart phone use can be so obsessive these days that it overshadows our real life. With our heads in the digital world, we lose the ability to make social contact. TendAR lets us take a new look at our relationship with technology and the people around us.

The star of this experimental augmented reality game is Guppy, a fish that we can entice out of its fishbowl to swim around the world in AR. It sets out in search of food, in the form of the emotions it can read on people’s faces. Guppy learns about and analyzes the world by consuming players’ facial expressions and scanning physical objects in the environment.

For Guppy to evolve, players must learn to concoct a balanced diet of varied emotions. This process goes further than the Tamagotchi of the 1990s, which we kept alive by giving it attention. TendAR is all about interaction with both the device and the human environment. To succeed in this game, you need to be able to cooperate and to read people’s expressions.