Eric Johnson

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Sesame Workshop Shows Off Mobile Experiments in Rural India, Augmented Reality

EQ7G4126-LCan 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: