The multimedia challenges raised by pervasive games

Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other multimedia sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to a player’s movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game server and other players. We review recent examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as multimedia applications. We then consider the challenge of scaling pervasive games to include potentially very large numbers of players. We propose a new approach based upon a campaign model in which individuals, local groups and experts draw on a combination of pervasive games, online services and broadcasting to take part in national or even global events. We discuss the challenges that this raises for further researc

Landscape Study in Wireless and Mobile Learning in the post-16 sector

In the post-16 sector (further and higher education, and adult and community learning) there is a need to understand how wireless and mobile technologies can contribute to improving the student experience of learning, and help institutions fulfil their missions in an age of incomparably fast technological change. In the context of this interest and growing need, a Landscape Study project was commissioned by JISC through the Innovation strand of the JISC e-Learning Programme in 2004-5. Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and internationally, and to communicate our findings to a broad and varied audience. The Summary report is accompanied by 3 associated reports on 'Current Uses', 'Potential Uses' and 'Strategic Aspects'. (The four reports are available in one single document here.

RealCoins: A Case Study of Enhanced Model Driven Development for Pervasive Games

Model Driven Development (MDD) and Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) have been widely used in information system domains and achieved success in many open or in-house scenarios. But its application in the game domain is seldom and immature. In our research, we identified three issues that should be considered carefully in order to play the strength of MDD in the game development environment to a larger extend: 1) structured domain analysis should be done to assure the size and familiarity of the domain; 2) adapted process should be designed to save cost and support evolution; and 3) proper tools (especially language workbenches) should be evaluated and utilized to ease DSM tasks and accelerate iterations. In this paper, we explain these three issues and illustrate our solutions to them by presenting the development details (both technical and procedural) of one pervasive game case. We evaluate the gains and costs by involving MDD into the game development process. We reflect on the issues we have met, and discuss possible future works as well.an open access journa

Enabling rapid and cost-effective creation of massive pervasive games in very unstable environments

Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to player's movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game engine and other players. We review our recent deployment examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as wireless ad-hoc networking applications. We then identify the network support challenges of scaling pervasive games to include potentially mass numbers of players across extremely heterogeneous and unreliable networks. We propose a P2P overlay capable of storing large amount of game related data, which is the key to combating the loss of coverage and potential dishonesty of players. The proposed protocol decreases the deployment costs of the gaming infrastructure by self organization and utilizing storage space of users' devices. We demonstrate scalability and increased availability of data offered by the proposed protocol in simulation based evaluatio

Public ubiquitous computing systems:lessons from the e-campus display deployments

In this paper we reflect on our experiences of deploying ubiquitous computing systems in public spaces and present a series of lessons that we feel will be of benefit to researchers planning similar public deployments. We focus on experiences gained from building and deploying three experimental public display systems as part of the e-campus pro ject. However, we believe the lessons are likely to be generally applicable to many different types of public ubicomp deployment