Exploration of Pervasive Games in Relation to Mobile Technologies

The project is an exploration of Pervasive Games in relation to mobile technologies, with the intention of developing a pervasive game engine. Pervasive Games are interactive games where the participants drive the game play by playing the game in both the real world and a virtual environment. This is an area of gaming that has rapidly evolved over the last few years. The initial research involved establishing several key elements common to existing pervasive applications, defining real world / virtual world considerations for game play (both positive and negative) and identifying the technical requirements needed to implement play elements on a mobile device. After comparing several platforms the Windows 7 platform was selected for development purposes. The requirements for establishing a working development platform (with delivery mechanism) was investigated and a working environment set-up. A pervasive games engine was then developed in the format of 67 code stubs (coding solutions) that allow the implementation of solutions to gaming elements required in the development of pervasive applications. Two new helper classes were in addition developed containing solutions to topics related to run-time data storage (StorageUtils.cs) and generic gaming tasks (GameCode.cs). A pervasive game was implemented to test a cross section of functionality in the engine. The basic principle behind the game was to overlay various layers video, backgrounds, sprite and text, to build up an immersive pervasive environment with a player in the centre of the game imagery, game domain and real world. The intention of the game was to see how the pervasive game experience could be reflected in the game mechanics and pervasive interaction, while utilising the engine functionality

mHealth Research Applied to Regulated and Unregulated Behavioral Health Sciences

Behavioral scientists are developing new methods and frameworks that leverage mobile health technologies to optimize individual level behavior change. Pervasive sensors and mobile apps allow researchers to passively observe human behaviors “in the wild” 24/7 which supports delivery of personalized interventions in the real-world environment. This is all possible because these technologies contain an incredible array of sensors that allow applications to constantly record user location and can contextualize current environmental conditions through barometers, thermometers, and ambient light sensors and can also capture audio and video of the user and their surroundings through multiple integrated high-definition cameras and microphones. These tools are a game changer in behavioral health research and, not surprisingly, introduce new ethical, regulatory/legal and social implications described in this article

Social pervasive systems: The integration of social networks and pervasive systems

Sensor technology embedded in smart mobile devices branded such devices as candidates for building innovative context-aware pervasive applications. On a parallel front, the notable evolution in the shape and form of social networking and their seamless accessibility from mobile devices founded a goldmine of contextual information. Utilizing an ecosystem that combines both mobile smart devices and a big data like environment in the form of social networks allows for the creation of an elitist set of services and applications that merge the two domains. In this paper, and following the footsteps of similar research efforts that attempted to combine both domains, we describe what we label as Social Pervasive Systems that cross-pollinate a mutually influential mobile and social world with opportunities for new breeds of applications. We present herein the evolution of the merger between both worlds for a better understanding. Above and beyond what related work achieved, we present a set of new services and potential applications that emerge from this new blend, and also describe some of the expected challenges such systems will face

Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices

With the recent growth of conversational systems and intelligent assistants such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant, mobile devices are becoming even more pervasive in our lives. As a consequence, users are getting engaged with the mobile apps and frequently search for an information need in their apps. However, users cannot search within their apps through their intelligent assistants. This requires a unified mobile search framework that identifies the target app(s) for the user's query, submits the query to the app(s), and presents the results to the user. In this paper, we take the first step forward towards developing unified mobile search. In more detail, we introduce and study the task of target apps selection, which has various potential real-world applications. To this aim, we analyze attributes of search queries as well as user behaviors, while searching with different mobile apps. The analyses are done based on thousands of queries that we collected through crowdsourcing. We finally study the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models for this task and propose two simple yet effective neural models that significantly outperform the baselines. Our neural approaches are based on learning high-dimensional representations for mobile apps. Our analyses and experiments suggest specific future directions in this research area.Comment: To appear at SIGIR 201

Pervasive Games in a Mote-Enabled Virtual World Using Tuple Space Middleware

Pervasive games are a new and exciting field where the user experience benefits from the blending of real and virtual elements. Players are no longer confined to computer screens. Rather, interactions with devices embedded within the real world and physical movements become an integral part of the gaming experience. Several prototypes of pervasive games have been proposed by both industry and academia. However, in such games the issues arising from the integration of players and real world, the management of the context surrounding the players, and the need for communication and distributed coordination are often addressed in an ad-hoc fashion. Therefore, the underlying software fabric is often not reusable, ultimately slowing down the diffusion of pervasive games. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a pervasive game on top of TinyLIME, a middleware system supporting data sharing among mobile and embedded devices. By illustrating the design of a pervasive game we developed, we argue concretely that the programming abstractions supported by TinyLIME greatly simplify the data and context management characteristics of pervasive games, and provide an effective and reusable building block for their development. TinyLIME was originally designed to support applications where mobile users collect data from sensors scattered in the physical environment. We build upon this capability to put forth a second contribution, namely, the use of wireless sensor devices (or motes) as a computing platform for pervasive games. Besides reporting physical data for the sake of the game, we use motes to store information relevant to the game plot, e.g., virtual objects. Motes are typically very small in size, and therefore can be hidden in the environment, enhancing the sense of immersion in a virtual world. To the best of our knowledge, this original use of wireless sensor devices is novel in the scientific and gaming literature. Furthermore, it is naturally supported by TinyLIME, yielding a unified programming abstraction that spans the heterogeneous gaming platform we propose

Applying an SOM Neural Network to Increase the Lifetime of Battery-Operated Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have garnered significant attention in recent years. According to (The Mobile Internet, 2004), more than half a billion nodes will be shipped for wireless sensor applications in 2010, for an end user market worth at least $7 billion. Wireless sensor networks are one of the first real-world examples of pervasive computing, the notion that small, smart, computing and cheap sensing devices will eventually permeate the environment (Bulusu & Jha, 2005). The combination of distributed sensing, low power processors and wireless communication enables such technology to be used in a wide array of applications such as habitat monitoring and environment monitoring, military solutions, such as battlefield surveillance, and commercial applications, such as monitoring material fatigue and managing inventory.peer-reviewe

Developing A Framework To Analyze The Effect Of Mobile Technology Within A Department Of Transportation

Mobile technology is becoming more and more pervasive within the consumer industry. Devices such as Smartphones and Tablets are able to relay information effectively and affordably either with or without an accompanying cellular connectivity plan. The effect of this technology is slowly making its way through the corporate world. Recognizing that this technology has the potential to affect workflow practices within a Department of Transportation, this thesis first presents two mobile applications to address specific areas of concern identified within the Utah Department of Transportation maintenance division. The first application creates a living directory that provides specific information regarding employees, equipment, and location within maintenance shed locations throughout the state of Utah. The second application provides a seamless method of information transfer as it relates to traffic signs from the field directly to central servers in an effort to reduce data loss and corruption

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing