Double take: Mobile game forces people to look around them again

Amsterdam – Few people look around them anymore. We’re all too busy staring at our phones. Cucalu, a new mobile photography game, hopes to change that by using the device that is zapping all our attention to plug us back into our surroundings.

Cucalu aims to help players to reconnect with their environment through a very simple premise: find the shapes. Bringing out the child in all of us, Cucalu sets missions such as ‘find six circles in your comfort zone (a 250-metre radius from your home).’ Players then set about photographing the shapes they find. Other players will see the images and award stars for creativity. Once enough stars have been awarded, another mission will be unlocked.

‘When you are not familiar with a place, you look around and spot new and interesting things,’ says Daniel Disselkoen, co-founder of Dutch creative agency Headmade, whose idea spawned the game. ‘But the better you know a place, the less tempted you are to look around. I wanted to create something simple that literally gives you a new perspective.’

As technology melds seamlessly into the backgrounds of our lives, developers are beginning to use it to bring people back to themselves. We will explore this theme in our forthcoming Awakening Tech macrotrend, to be presented at our Trend Briefing, The Me-conomy. For tickets, visit our Eventbrite page.