Whether you’re headed to Mardi Gras or another festival or attraction, wearables can help find children in a crowd.

Although wearable technology has been primarily focused on issues such as health and fitness tracking as well as call and text alerts, it is now being speculated that these devices might also become very popular among parents who want to make sure their kids can find their way back again if they should wander off in a crowd.

This is good news for parents who will be bringing little ones to the Mardi Gras celebrations, this year.

That said, wearable technology’s benefit for helping scared and lost children to find their parents, once again, is hardly limited to the Carnival season. As events start to become more common over the spring and summer, the need to keep track of kids and to give them a way to be safely returned to parents will only become more important. In this way, parents will not only be able to keep track of event locations, concert schedules, parade routes, and festival maps, but they’ll also bring young ones back to parents again.

This use for wearable technology will be important for helping families to keep calm and to stick together.

While many events – including Mardi Gras – are designed to be exceptionally family friendly, when such a large number of people are all milling about in the same location, it takes only a split second before family members can become separated from each other. Moreover, it takes only a few feet of distance before another person can become impossible to see from among all the rest of the people in the crowd, particularly with so many other distracting, colorful and exciting things going on all around. Parents are now using wearables to make it possible for little ones to send an alert to the smartphones of their parents when they’re lost or scared, without having to find a phone of their own.

This is being accomplished through gadgets such as the GizmoPal 2, which is made by LG and that runs on the Verizon network. It employs GPS and wearable technology that will allow children press a button to access two-way communication with their parents.

As though rock climbing weren’t exciting enough, AR is now being used to turn it into a kind of video game.

Indoor climbing company, Brooklyn Boulders, has now launched a new type of augmented reality experience that allows its customers to turn their regular bouldering challenges into an entirely new competitive video game experience.

The sport of indoor rock climbing has been spiking in popularity and businesses are working to stand out.

As climbing gyms start to appear all across the United States, it is reaching the point that these companies are starting to need to work to allow themselves to stand out from the competition. In this effort, Brooklyn Boulders – located in New York City – has become the first in this industry to implement an augmented reality technology based game on their bouldering wall. The hope is that by adding a lit up, competitive game experience similar to video gaming, it will help to make this sport even more appealing and will draw people specifically into their location.

The augmented reality climbing game experience was first created by John Cheng and is called Time Trial.

Time Trial is a form of digital AR climbing game from the Randori startup. The game works by projecting numbered circles next to the hand hold positions on the various climbing walls. When a climber touches those circles, he or she gains points. The purpose of the game is to be able to collect all the available points throughout the length of a climb. Moreover, the climber must complete the bouldering challenge within the shortest time possible.

In order to run the Time Trial system, the equipment needed includes a laptop to run the program, a camera sensor, and projectors. Cheng, a former student of computer science, is a Brooklyn Boulders member and originally demoed his AR game, last year. Since it was first showcased, Time Trial has gone through additional evolution as it can now display the scores and times of the climber on the wall next to the number targets.

Cheng is now working to implement the augmented reality climbing experience at locations outside of Brooklyn Boulders and is currently looking into opportunities in Queensbridge and Chicago.