Toward a mobile platform for pervasive games

Abstract

Emerging pervasive games will be immersed into real-life situations and leverage new types of contextual interactions therein. For instance, a player's punching gesture, running activity, and fast heart rate conditions can be used as the game inputs. Although the contextual interaction is the core building blocks of pervasive games, individual game developers hardly utilize a rich set of interactions within a game play. Most challenging, it is significantly difficult for developers to expect dynamic availability of input devices in real life, and adapt to the situation without system-level support. Also, it is challenging to coordinate its resource use with other gaming logics or applications. To address such challenges, we propose Player Space Director (PSD), a novel mobile platform for pervasive games. PSD facilitates the game developers to incorporate diverse contextual interactions in their game without considering complications in player's real-life situations, e.g., heterogeneity, dynamics or resource scarcity of input devices. We implemented the PSD prototype on mobile devices, diverse set of sensors, and actuators. On top of PSD, we developed three exploratory applications, ULifeAvatar, Swan Boat, U-Theater, and showed the effectiveness of PSD through extensive deployment of those games.