Real Tournament – mobile context‐aware gaming for the next generation
| Published date | 01 February 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470410520113 |
| Pages | 55-64 |
| Date | 01 February 2004 |
| Author | Maomao Wu,Keith Mitchell,Duncan McCaffery,Joe Finney,Adrian Friday |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Real Tournament
±
mobile context-aware
gaming for the next
generation
Maomao Wu
Keith Mitchell
Duncan McCaffery
Joe Finney and
Adrian Friday
1 Introduction
Previous research experiences in next generation
mobile networking[1], context-aware
computing (Davies et al., 1999), and recent
sensor-based computing[2] has made it possible
for us to explore the impact of ubiquitous
computing (Weiser, 1991) on the lives of people
in Lancaster. One of the novel applications we
are investigating as one of the MIPv6 Systems
Research Lab's (MSRL's) collaborative
projects[3] is a mobile context-aware multiplayer
team game, known as Real Tournament, which is
targeted at children aged 11-12 years old and
contains a variety of educational, mental,
physical and entertainment-based challenges.
The game is designed to be played in a real world
environment using handheld personal
computing devices augmented with an array of
sensors. These sensors are then used to gather
the game player's context, e.g. location,
orientation, activity, and identity, etc. Different
wireless communication technologies have been
employed to create the wireless overlay network
infrastructure, and internetworking is enabled by
the Mobile IPv6 protocol. New features in the
Mobile IPv6, e.g. auto-configuration, smooth
handoff, extension headers, have been actively
utilised during the process of the game design
and implementation. An additional security
mechanism has also been integrated into the
network layer to protect both our open wireless
network and the privacy of the end users.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows.
We start introducing the research background
and motivation that impels us to develop this
specific novel application. Then we describe the
carefully designed game scenario that enables
us to actively research the features in three
different areas: mobile networking,
context-aware computing, and sensor-based
computing. In section five, we demonstrate the
benefits of our game architecture to the existing
approaches, and enumerate the game
components followed by their implementation
status. The wireless overlay network
infrastructure is introduced in section six, as
well as the integrated security mechanism.
Related work is presented in section seven, and
finally we make our conclusions and propose
some future work.
The authors
Maomao Wu is a Research Assistant, Keith Mitchell is a
Research Associate, Duncan McCaffery is a PhD student,
Joe Finney and Adrian Friday are Lecturers, all in the
Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Computing
Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Keywords
Multimedia, Mobile communication systems,
Research results, Interactive video, Interactive programming
Abstract
With the recent advances in mobile networking,
context-aware computing, and sensor-based computing,
researchers and game designers are able to explore the
potential of combining these new technologies to develop
mobile, networked, context-aware, augmented reality
multiplayer games. As part of new research collaboration
between Lancaster University, Cisco Systems, Microsoft
Research and Orange ± MIPv6 Systems Research Lab, such a
mobile context-aware multiplayer game is proposed and
explored. The proposed game,
Real Tournament
, gathers
real-time contextual information, e.g. physical location and
orientation, from the players and injects them into the game
engine to generate game events.
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
55
The Electronic Library
Volume 22 .Number 1 .2004 .pp. 55-64
#Emerald Group Publishing Limited .ISSN 0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/02640470410520113
To continue reading
Request your trial