Having spent my summer monster hunting I have been neglecting my blogging duties so here is an interesting little project based on an idea that’s been festering in the back of my mind for a while. Not content with inflicting 3D glasses on you for anaglyph photography I thought it would be interesting to explore using them in a mobile game and finally managed to persuade a student, Ahmed Alansari, it would be a good idea. Basically it’s a touch based game similar to the old Asteroids game except with 3D anaglyph blocks flying out at you which you destroy by tapping with your finger. Here is the current prototype which still needs some work on the explosions but even with this poor quality video you get the idea. I am of course assuming you all still have those 3D glasses ;).

Im pretty sure it the first game of this type and quite probably the last ;)

In terms of my games Free Londons Monsters is the mobile augmented reality game I have previously discussed but the following video is the Mk2 version of the Magic Monstervision Machine in action.

MashReality is a playful experience in the form of a community driven interactive narrative played out as a visualisation on a large public screen with player interacting using text Messages. In many respects its and evolution of our original TxtBk project but designed to be more accessible to all. 

In any one is down in London that weekend I would encourage you to check out the programme of great games available (in addition to mine of course ;) ) and come down and play. If you are there feel free to say hi

We had good news from the Flash Developer Challenge yesterday as our new location based game Big Game Huntr took the innovation prize out of 150 entries worldwide. I am particularly pleased to get the innovation prize as I believe the game represents a new generation of mobile gaming designed specifically for the medium and harnessing player creativity in an exciting new direction. I would also acknowledge the hard work of the two students involved Mark Lochrie and Kate Lund in getting it to this point. We are hoping to enter Open Beta testing soon and I look forward to offering it to the community here as first testers.

I have been working on the Mobile Magic Monstervision Machine to improve the functionality and introduce better game play and the following images are screenshots captured during the first full scale trial. I added the holding trap (in a homage to Ghostbusters) to indicate your progress during the game.  When a particular monster has been captured its position is indicated on the map and the time of capture indicated in the holding trap inventory. To aid exploration I introduced a hot, warm, cold metaphor indicated on the Monstervision Machine by snowflake, sun, and flame icons which are triggered by measuring your distance from a  monster (in this trial warm was 30m and hot 20m) which seems to work really well with the players thus far. As an added touch when the Monstervision Machine is hot the phone vibrates and shouts MONSTER which is fun. Finally rather than have a GPS bar I have indicated this as ‘Captoplasm’  as it indicates the importance of having a signal but doesn’t detract from the game concept.

Next week we intend to test the game in London with more REAL people and new user generated monsters .

I have been working on an interesting take on a location based game recently which incorporates user generated content in the form of sketches of monsters. It’s in collaboration with my friend and artist Andrew Wilson who ran a workshop at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where people could sketch there idea of what the London’s monsters might look like.  I met up with Andrew a few of weeks ago at Futuresonic and we hatched a plan to turn the sketches into a mobile location based game called Free London's Monsters to be played around the actual locations where the monsters were envisaged. I had a small team of students (Frank, Laura, Richard, Rebecca, and Tabona) put together a first prototype using some bits of code I had lying around which uses the phone camera as the Magic Monstervision Machine (that’s an S60 phone to the uninitiated) to capture monsters when the players enter their lair. It’s worth noting this was done in less than two weeks with no previous experience of PyS60. Here’s a short video by the students of the prototype in action.

Iam am currently extending the application to include a map, game-time, and capture lists and a few other fun features but the basic functionality will be as shown. We are planning to test the first prototype at the Sandpit event at the end of June (ehich are free and if you in London around RCA pop along) before we hopefully present the more elaborate version at this year’s Hide and Seek festival which introduces social games and playful experiences from 31st July to 2nd August at the Southbank Centre, London.

I think the idea of incorporating the user generated content within the game is very interesting and is likely to greatly enhance the user experience. This concept also forms the basis of another location based game I am working on as I think UGC can be used to great effect in location based games

It’s a sad day for me as the Widsets platform is officially closed which means that the many innovative widgets we produced will suffer the same sad demise. In particular the loss of Bombus and Boom! which finish with 1.5 million users.  I would like to say both thanks to everyone who played the game but also pay a large tribute to the team who developed Widsets which I think was a wonderful piece of work.

We did consider changing the widgets to J2ME an put them on OVI but the requirement to have J2ME applications Java verified (not sure of logic behind this)makes it to costly for us to consider so Bombus and Boom! RIP.

Having warmed myself up with a small game rant (sorry Andreas) I am off to a hopefully sunny San Francisco (hence the quote from Oscar Wilde) for the great gathering of the game nerds at GDC. I am speaking at Mobile GDC on How do we socialise mobile games? and instead of often technology inspired talks I am getting all ‘touchy and feely’ around the premise of games as social information appliances or social objects. If anyone from here is there feel free to say hi and I will be the one NOT talking about the IPhone.

It seems a long time ago since I blogged about the operation of the accelerometer sensors and made a plea for their inclusion as a standard feature (I am of course assuming the positive outcome was because people actually listened to me rather than me being just prophetic ). Anyway I have already discussed in previous blogs about Streetview and other aspects of Point ‘N’ Seek utilising the magnetometer sensor (generally described as the digital compass) so here are some practical details of how it works in practice (I always feel a visualisation helps). As with the accelerometer in its raw form you have three outputs x,y,z which means that you can find directional information ,were your phone is pointing, whatever its orientation. For example the Figure below shows the outputs on the three axis for the phone held with the screen parallel to the users face (i.e. upright) and in the normal portrait orientation and when the phone is held so that the screen is parallel with the ground as you would use a normal compass. The plots start with the phone facing North then rotated through East, South and West and pausing at each alignment for around 5 seconds and you can clearly see the four compass points.

The illustrate the actual rotational change the following figure illustrates the three outputs for a continuous clockwise rotation with the phone held upright going clockwise from North.

The second graph of the figure is after applying some simple signal processing whereby we can combine these outputs along phone orientation from the accelerometer to produce an output that could easily be turned into an angle from North. Indeed the sensor API does provide a range of options one being for an angle from North as shown. 

The problem but we have found this appears to be slightly sluggish (as illustrated) and my feeling is that a low pass filter has been applied to give a smooth scrolling of Maps when used for navigation. However, I have other plans for the sensor so will likely create my own algorithms using the raw outputs previously illustrated. Hopefully people will find this blog as useful as the one on accelerometers but judging by the time lag from last time you might want to return to this in about 12 months .

BTW should have said the data is from a S60 application running on the Nokia 6210 Navigator

As Arto has recently done some interesting blogs relating to bio-signal and pain monitoring and Nokia launching a phone Heart rate Monitor combo I thought its useful to discuss the extension of the work  Carlos and I have done using an Heart Rate Monitor  to provide mobile exergaming. In this research we experimented with four different user input controls to the game to try and find a balance between benefits to the heart and game play as shown in the following video.

The following figure shows Carlos heart rate for the four schemes presented in the video. Interesting although the third scheme (all actions triggered by a small physical jump) provides the greatest exertion its probably the hardest to play and the final scheme ( all physical movement control ) provides the best balance between exertion and game play.

Tomorrow I’m running the first (and hopefully not the last) 24 hr GameJam event for the students here at Infolab21 at Lancaster University. I have managed to persuade a very interesting array of speakers to kick the GameJam off and although the competition itself is only open to students If anyone is in this area and wants to attend you are more than welcome.  Sorry not to do this sooner been busy getting it all organised

This blog relates to my favorite MSc project from last year which was completed by one my favorite students Klen Copic Pucihar who was also behind the very successful 4 in a row widget game. Basically I wanted to create a social network whose principal interaction was performed via mobile and addressed the fact the most people are not in fact members of one large social homogeneous network but rather members of a complex array of smaller networks generally formed around specific relationships, activities or places. To this end we created the mobile social network Chillrs which was named after its use of small communal public displays which in this case was on a fridge as shown in the figure below.

 Whilst the fridge door metaphor is not a new idea the use within Chillrs provides what effectively could be considered as equivalent to suped up Whereabouts clock used by the Weasleys’ in the Harry Potter films. The mobile widget allows users to define their current location through there personally generated location list which is updated on any of the Chillr displays they are a member off. For instance you could have a family Chillr, a work Chillr, or team Chillr, the point is that you can then filter the information you supply to the individual social networks you belong too rather than revealing the same information to all. The current version allows users to post not only their location but blogs, to do notes, shopping lists which builds upon the fridge door metaphor but we envisage other functionality could be more applicable to different group and users could customize the display to their own particular needs. The display doesn’t have to be a physical item such as the Nokia 810 (finally found a good use for mine  )we embedded in this small beer fridge but could be a desktop widget and indeed all the information is available through the mobile application itself. The following video not only presents the widget but also the display (if you can sit through it to the end as itsone of my longer productions  ). Personally I think that addressing the need for smaller more intimate social networks deserves more attention and I can envisage a Chillrs type service being incredibly popular.

In my last post I introduced the project Point’N’Seek  and in this post I present the latest added functionality which I hinted at in my last blog of allowing users to augment the POI of interest with their own location and direction aware photographs. The following video shows this in operation and what is  particularly novel comes at the end when user can spatially search the photographs of a particular POI to obtain one from a specific direction.  The idea is that this could be used to make POI easier to find by pedestrians as the photograph they see would be from the direction the will be approaching it from. The example in the video is a photo of Infolab21 taken from a position NW of the buildingAn added bonus is that a database of such photographs could perhaps be stitched together to create a king of user generated Streetview perhaps using something like the Microsofts Photosyth image processing.

In the next stage of development we are planning to switch to Navteq Maps to allow us to fully explore orientation. Any other suggestions gratefully received.

In light of the advancing sensor support on the latest phones I decided to revitalise some of my work in LBS with my student Zhang Lei particularly around the old idea of geo-wands. Whilst many LBS present scenarios for users searching for Points of Interest (POI) that are proximate to the current location whereas geo-wands the commonly observed practice of horizon scanning in which users seek out interesting landmarks within their field of vision of direction of travel (often by pointing at them). This phenomenon is particularly prevalent amongst tourists who often scan their surrounding for interesting buildings or objects which they may then look up on a tourist map to find additional information. Point ‘n’ Seek facilitates this process through a novel gesture based control mechanism using on-board accelerometers and compass (as per the Navigator) enabling users simply point at the object the wish to have information about (compass provides rotational direction whilst accelerometers are used to provide distance control). Additionally Point ‘n’ Seek provides other user centred search facilities through its ‘Torchlight’ functionality where the region around the users or the object the user is pointing at is scanned by a search beam whose width is selectable by the use or alternatively a search beam is presented in the direction of the object/location the user is interested in as illustrated in the figure below.

Thus far we have implemented the software with control from the joy-pad and as yet the compass is the sticking point for the rotational control (anyone from Nokia reading this who can help please feel free to contact me). However, as the following video shows, the joypad solution still has obvious benefits in that it would work for non sensor enabled phones and we hope to get the full solution with more functionality going soon and i will blog again atthat time.

I Just  wanted to share the fact that our (me and Will) original widget game Bombus has passed the ½ million users mark and our second game Boom has over  300,000. Both of these games have formed part of our research in exploring Web 2.0 ideas within games to create what we called Mobile Games 2.0. As academics is great for us to get such numbers and aids us to present our research with real authority on how these paradigms might work.  These are also great pointers to the power of allowing user driven communities to rate and rank content they feel is good and highlight the potential for widgets as application area.

We would particularly like to thank Kevin Sharp at Forum Nokia for starting us down this road as he gave us the idea for the project by suggesting we do a how to Blog on widgets devlopment.

A few blogs ago I said we had created a model of the Lancaster University campus which we (myself and Carlos) would transfer to the mobile phone to test some 3D navigation ideas for pedestrians. We have managed to get the model into M3G (and working reasonably well despite not having yet optimised the code) and the next step is to build in GPS (and eventually Compass) data which will control a you-are-here globe which will move in real-time.

This extra data along with the colour selection of the buildings already seen in the video will allow us to explore how best to present 3D tour navigation to the user (for example first person, third personand, fly through etc) what type of control of the view and functionality is optimal for the user for a particular requirement i.e route navigation, POI information, etc . I’m hoping to build on my favourite paper ‘Exploring the design space of Smart Horizons’ form this year’s mobile HCI which looked at user viewing preferences of  3D  spatial data and POI. I will keep a record of this project progression going on the blog so perhaps the community can pitch in with any thoughts or ideas which will help us evolve the project.