Color Quest AR

Healthy eating education for children has a lot of resistance to overcome. The slick advertisements for unhealthy food and the societal negativity about the taste of vegetables conspire to create an outlook on eating habits that can lead to a lifetime of harmful food intake.

Color Quest combines three quite distinct concepts to deliver its player experience.  Its main educational thrust is health and healthy eating.  It then has two interactive elements: colouring in and manipulating the resulting artwork in an augmented reality environment.

It is always difficult to combine purely informational learning content with fun gameplay elements.  In this case, healthy eating facts are displayed after each colouring task is completed.  The subjects to be coloured in are also fruit and vegetables brought to life in cartoon form.  As children play through the app, they will learn new things and, hopefully, have their perceptions of fruit and vegetables challenged or made more positive.

The colouring part of the app is as good as or better than any other such app.  There is only so much an app can do to overcome the unsuitability of a finger, even a child-sized one, for fine-detail colouring in.  Color Quest offers different brush sizes and the facility to zoom in.  It works well and, with care, quite precise and detailed colouring can be achieved.

After the character has been coloured in, the option arrives to activate what is the app's most unique feature: the use of augmented reality (AR).  The player is talked through a simple calibration process using the device camera as the software recognises where the floor is.   This has worked without fail each time on the review device - both quickly and accurately.

If you've never used AR before, this is quite the novelty as a cartoon fruit or vegetable comes alive in your room.  You use the device as a window into the augmented world.  You'll see your floor, walls and furniture, but dancing seamlessly among them will be the cartoon character.  The effect is realistic enough that many people are guilty of a quick peek outside of the screen to see whether the floor area remains free of cartoons in reality!  People can appear alongside the characters.  Snapshots and videos can be captured which all add to the fun.  The results have a look of magic about them that will enthral young children.

The colouring and the AR activities work together extremely well and are very entertaining.  Inevitably, the healthy eating facts can feel a little "tacked on" but the positivity built by the fruit and vegetable characters helps bridge the gap.  The facts are well written and relevant, though, so if children remember just a few it is a definite win for healthy living.

Color Quest is a well-made app that has a good motive and a novel way of achieving its aims.  Everything mentioned in this review is available for free so there is no reason not to download it for some artistic and educational fun.  Later, the supporting website says, further methods to expand the app will be released and you can make your decision regarding these at that time.

It will be interesting to see Color Quest grow but, in the meantime, it is good fun and educational too.  At the terrific price of free, you have nothing stopping you from introducing a little fruit and vegetable magic into your child's life.

You can download Color Quest AR on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Color Quest AR app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.