Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

3D Anaglyph Mobile Gaming

coultonp — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:06:26 +0300

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 ;)

Game Over!

coultonp — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:00:45 +0300

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.

"I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life."

coultonp — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:04:03 +0200

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.

Mobile Exergaming

coultonp — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:35:20 +0200

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.

GameJam@Infolab21 (mobile game design event)

coultonp — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:32:22 +0200

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

Widget game passes half a million users mark!

coultonp — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:02:40 +0200

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.

Retro Mobile Gaming

coultonp — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:06:02 +0200

I came across my old Atari Lynx at home and having been at the Nokia Games Summit I was inspired to bring it in to work to see if I could get it going. The original power supply was knackered but I managed to cobble something together to get it to work. The photo below shows how 1989 technology stacks up against an N95 and illustrates an evolution in mobile gaming.

Although the controls are very different the screen size is about the same butthe resolution and colour depth are lower. Interestingly the game on the Lynx is ‘Todd’s Adventures in Slime World’ which was a very playable game and would probably give many current mobile games a run for their money in terms of actual game play.

As seen on TV and stress relief

coultonp — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:49:48 +0300

Last night the BBC aired a program (can be seen here if your really interested) hosted by Physicist Brian Cox which featured some of my work (nice N95' shots) and some from my colleagues in Infolab21 and apart from elevating me to the exalted tile of ‘Boffin’ its gives me a excuse to show one of my favourite projects of 2008 I had undergraduate Drew Jackson working on. The title of the project was Lancaster Bomber (in honour of the famous WW2 aircraft named after our fair city) and it’s a game whereby we recreated the Lancaster University campus to allow me to fly around and shoot at the buildings in my very own Lancaster Bomber. Here comes the stress relief if you watch the video from the BBC you will see my workplace Infolab21 and if you then watch the game you will see me blow it up in the game (after a nice flying manoever through the underpass which is were our buses depart from )which after a hard day can be deeply satisfying.

Interestingly the models of campus were made using Google Sketch-up (didn’t quite have enough time to finish all the detail for the whole of campus but that can be done later) and transferred to Dark Basic to turn it into a game. This proved to be a remarkably flexible solution ( especially as Drew hadn’t done any 3D modelling before) and meant we could use the models in a variety of forms on different platforms. My limited experience of flight simulator controls shows up in the video so I am planning to replace them by using an N95 instead.

Motion Control for 3-D Mobile Virtual/Augmented Reality Worlds

coultonp — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:23:47 +0200

As many of you will realise I have been a long term advocate of accelerometers on phones and have a number of students having worked in this area. Today I wanted to present the novel S60 API developed by my PhD student Fadi Chehimi to provide 3-D motion control for navigating with 3-D virtual and augmented environments running on mobile phones which we have called Mirage-X. To demonstrate the power of the API , Fadi and I came up with the very simple game we have called Mirage Money the aim of which is that players ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen. There game has two playing modes:Real Mirage where coins are augmented on images captured by the phone camera, and Virtual Mirage where the coins are floating in a virtual, sky-bounded environment. As these concepts are best explained with a video we have created the one below.

This game further illustrates the power of accelerometers and in particular the advantage of this interface is that it not only minimizes the use of buttons on the phone it also allows a more intuitive interface experience and allows the user to maintain the optimum viewing angle to the screen.

We are also currently investigating two further game extensions that will expand the possibilities of using the API, the first will allow two players to battle through space over a Bluetooth connection and second will utilize the N95’s GPS to create a novel augmented reality location based game.

The use of GPS with the API has then obvious uses within the fields of tourism or information services but in an ideal case we would also have access to a digital compass to provide accurate orientation. Having pleaded the case for accelerometers in the past can I now suggest a digital compass? As it has lots of possible benefits and in particular I can see it helping with pedestrian navigation.

New mobile games book

coultonp — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:33:36 +0200

I thought I would announce the new book I contributed to with my colleague Fadi Chehimi called ‘Games on the Symbian OS’ by my fellow champion Jo Stichbury.

The book itself "shows the potential for creating mobile games for Symbian Smartphone’s such as S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 3 or FOMA devices. It covers various aspects of mobile games on Symbian OS, with contributions from a number of experts in the mobile games industry, including Nokia’s N-Gage team, Ideaworks3D, and ZingMagic, as well as academics leading the field of innovative mobile experiences."

Fadi and I had the pleasure of producing the chapter on using the phone hardware (camera, accelerometers, amongst other fun stuff) and the book will be launched at GDC next month. I have long espoused the need for a book of this sort so was delighted when Jo asked me to contribute. I am speaking at Mobile GDC on “Mobile Games 2.0: the rise of the mobile widget?” so if anyone is going to be there feel free to say high.

Oh yes we will be producing something special for the Boom widget so even if you cant make it dowload it an see what happens