The Pervasive Experience Lab (in short PELS) aims to explore and develop future entertainment formats and applications of pervasive experiences. Pervasive Computing, Mixed and Augmented Reality provide us with new visions, how experiences, entertainment and video game can intuitively be embedded into our everyday life (Müller, Alt and Michelis 2011, Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009). One goal of the project is to make the city and province of Salzburg become a digital stage, which enables visitors and residents alike to experience and explore it in potentially new and exciting ways.

 

a collaboration between

 

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A prototype of a location-based game evaluating Unity as a tool for pervasive games and applications. The aim was to use a wide range of built-in sensors that modern mobile phones offer, to try sensor integration.

The player balances the mobile phone swiftly in level. In the center of the screen there is ball that starts to move with the smallest tilt. Way-points on the edge of the screen need to be reached before you are catched by the red dots that seem to hunt you. When you turn the phone in their direction the hunters get slowed down for some relief. If the player manages to reach the endpoint without being caught or loosing balance the game is won.

Sensors integrated: GPS for location, accelerator and gyroscope for tilt and gesture recognition, compass for orientation

The game mixes classic game-play with new technologies. The otherwise inanimate urban space and objects become revived. This sample could be extended with further technologies and sensors: Camera for computer vision, graphic programming for augmented reality scenarios and RFID/NFC technology or marker-systems to integrate the surrounding and real objects.

Team

Jürgen Brunner - Development
Thomas Wagner - Development
PELS (University of applied sciences)

 

Concept

LinkedDots can be understood as a “pop-up” game space (overlay) on a square, which invites people to collaboratively explore it, to play and even transform the system of the game. It will not be site-specific, but adaptable and will fit different places. The system consists of a thermal camera tracking solution, a game engine and a mapped projection from above.

Visitors get tracked by the camera and a graphical representation is projected around their location. The playing area is defined by the boundaries of the projection. Through their movements, visitors will e.g. trigger sounds, play simple games or affect virtual scenery.

Creating a playful experience in an urban environment requires possessing different levels of engagement. There are at least players, observers and passersby. These are similar to the game awareness states (unaware state, ambiguous state and conscious/aware state) introduced by Markus Montola and Annika Waern (Montola & Waern 2006; Montola, Stenros & Waern 2009). Taking this into account we focused on creating a design which works without epic explanation and instructions to keep the threshold for participation low.

Tracking

We created our own tracking application using a thermal image camera. In contrast to traditional video cameras, thermal imaging technology does not require any additional lighting and is not affected by the projected image. The tracking application can use live video or a videofile (for testing) as input, extract and track the people and sending the data via the OSC protocol.

Jürgen Brunner - Development
 Thomas Wagner - Development
 PELS (University of applied sciences)