Startup ASMJ, recipient of this spring’s SK75 investment, is developing an interactive mobile game Auggies under the brand Moveo, wishing to encourage children to do exercise outside. It’s a solution that the Finance Daily nominated for the Best business idea award, because we can use it to successfully motivate children (and parents) to spend less time behind computers, tablets and phones, and more time in nature doing various fun activities.
As Finance Daily reported, the team of ASMJ, developing the interactive mobile game Auggies under the brand Moveo, wishes to encourage children to do exercise outside.
Different from their competition
And what makes them different from others, different from the competition offering similar solutions? “Many sports mobile apps do track sports activities in detail, but they lack infrastructure, a social component, and gamification. Auggies makes sure that children do exercise outside, in their actual environment, and use the app to learn about various educational topics,” says CEO of ASMJ, Andrej Strojin.The game works with help of augmented reality, which they use to motivate kids to do more exercise outside and discover their environment with the app. Today they are discovering the Tivoli park, for example, tomorrow Rožnik and similar. Meanwhile the app upgrades physical activities, such as jumps or 500 meters of walking, with fun games,” explains Strojin.
To augmented reality with MIT
In their app, they use object-recognition technology, which they developed at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “We give children the goal that they have to find a statue, cat, bird or a boat, and for that they need to go out. Once they find that object, they take a picture, and that’s when we use MIT’s technology, which recognizes this picture and returns information on what is recognizable.”According to Strojin, MIT strategically focused on augmented reality and is also investing a lot into startups working in this field. “Through our colleague Kirk Anderson, who does contract work for us in business development, we got to David Rose (entrepreneur and researcher at MIT Media Lab) who was thrilled about our idea and he offered us support, which meant his time and students,” is how Strojin tells the story of how they started collaborating with MIT.
You can find the whole article in Slovenian here.
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