Sesame Workshop Shows Off Mobile Experiments in Rural India, Augmented Reality
Can you tell me how to get to Galli Galli Sim Sim? Not all of India’s kids can, since many don’t have access to a TV, so the official Indian version of “Sesame Street” is expanding its reach with new mobile services that work on all phones.
Sesame Workshop’s Scott Chambers talked about those services at D: Dive Into Mobile today in New York City. The hope is that Sesame will now have a better way to educate children in rural areas, where mobile devices have greater penetration.
Chambers called the Indian mobile outreach program a “successful experiment.”
“The communities are using what they’ve learned just from watching this media,” he said, after showing a short video.
Chambers also demoed an augmented-reality application called Big Bird’s Words. With the app, children can use a phone’s camera to find printed words that Big Bird announces from out of a 500-word vocabulary. In the picture above, Chambers is finding the word “milk” on a label.
The app isn’t commercially available yet, but Sesame Workshop is experimenting with it now in the U.S.
“We look at [mobile] the same way we looked at television as an opportunity back in 1969,” Chambers said. “It’s not just using technology for technology’s sake.”
Check out video from Chambers’s appearance below: