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In and out of Reality: Janus-Faced LocationAwareness in Ubiquitous Games

Alexander HöhfeldUniversity of Trier/Department of Computer Science, Trier, Germany

[email protected]

Abstract — Many future ubiquitous devices will be able todetermine their precise physical position using differenttypes of localization techniques (e.g. GPS antennas for out-door-, RFID tags, infrared beacons or triangulation etc. inindoor settings). Especially for games in a mobile environ-ment usage of the devices, respectively player’s location willcapacitate new game functionality and content. LocationAwareness in this context is twofold though, correspondingto the games’ focus: Either the player’s actions can be influ-enced by providing additional information according to thedevices physical location (augmented or mixed reality) or lo-cation awareness directly or indirectly alters content andstate of the game (location immersion). This work focuses onthe presentation of two ubiquitous strategy games, whichare based on the same uniform middleware for MANETs,implementing the above mentioned different forms of lo-cation awareness.

Index Terms — Location Awareness, Mobile Learning, Mu-lti-Hop Ad Hoc Networks, Ubiquitous and Pervasive Strate-gy Games, Network Centric Operations.

I. INTRODUCTION

As GPS-antennas are getting smaller and more reliableeach day and the emerging of a broader range of indoorlocalization techniques, especially mobile devices willbenefit from this development. The devices themselvespossess increasing storage capacities and processing po-wer, providing the user not only with additional perfor-mance for his or her everyday work, but as well with su-

perior ubiquitous gaming possibilities. Combined with lo-cation and context awareness, these games will featurenew types of immersion experiences and new unique con-tent. Depending on game design and type different ap-proaches to use the devices and players physical locationwithin the applications have evolved. From a perspectiveof reality these range from augmentation, in which realityis enriched with virtual or simulated information, to im-mersion, where the position impacts the actual gamestate. This work presents two different ubiquitous gameswhich are taking advantage of location awareness: ATreasure Island scenario for the ncoML framework [1],using augmented reality techniques to influence the users

behavior and thus implicitly changing the game contentand UbiQuest [2], a science-fiction strategy game, usinglocation immersion to directly modify certaincharacteristics within the game according to the players

physical location. The following figure illustrates the dis-position of the two ubiquitous games in the context of reality:

Figure 1. Disposition in the context of reality

Chapter II will introduce the different game designs of the presented ubiquitous strategy games and their techni-cal realization. The follow-on chapters deal with the loca-lization strategies used within the presented games and

the experiences made during their development and tes-ting. The middleware environment JANE, both applica-tions are based on, is discussed in chapter V. Prior to pre-senting a short summary and conclusion, chapter VI fea-tures related work in the area of ubiquitous games and lo-cation awareness.

II. GAME DESIGN AND TECHNICAL REALIZATION

A. UbiQuest

UbiQuest is a real-time science fiction strategy andconflict simulation, similar to well known games like Ma-ster of Orion, Civilization or The Settlers. The basic idea

of these games is ported to a multi-hop ad hoc environ-ment. In UbiQuest the player controls a giant starship (re-presented by a location aware mobile device of PDA size)with a remainder of the earth’s population after a globalcrisis on its way to find new hospitable planets.

Starting with only a minimum of offensive, defensiveand economical capabilities, the ship can be upgraded bygathering resources from bypassed asteroid fields or pla-nets, building new on-board facilities, researching ad-vanced technology and increasing the ships population.Nearly all actions within the game are interconnected. Asan example, population growth is only possible if enoughhabitats for them are available. These on the other hand

can only be constructed if sufficient energy- and buildingresources are stored, while the speed of the constructionin turn is depending again on the population size, theirtraining level, etc.

UbiQuest ncoML

Location Immersion Augmented Reality

86 JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 2, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2007

© 2007 ACADEMY PUBLISHER



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since the environment, the player respectively the deviceis situated in, directly influences the games state and sta-tistics. This is typical for a location immersion technique.The basic principle in UbiQuest is: The more positive thereal environment is for the player, the more the in-game

development benefits from. This technique is supposed tomotivate the player to situate him or herself in a positiveenvironment. E.g. as a basic examples on a universitycampus physically moving in the park-like environmentbetween the lecture halls grants a boost to the birth rate of the ships population, while being located in less hospi-table surroundings decreases it.

On every device an XML-based map of the game areais stored, containing information about the different typesof “space” the star-ship passes through. Every area-typeencompasses several modifiers to in-game characteristics.If the ship enters, respectively leaves an area, these modi-fiers are applied or removed from the list of current modi-fiers. Areas can overlap as well, e.g. a parking lot near abig building could be represented by an asteroid field inthe vicinity of a large planet. In every area additionallydifferent kind of random encounters can occur with a pre-defined probability, like the discovery of alien artifacts orspace pirates.

B. Reality Augmentation in ncoML

In ncoML as well a digital map of the player’s sur-roundings is available. Here the university campus (forthe Treasure Island scenario) or a military training areaetc. is depicted within the device, augmented by virtualinformation relevant for the scenario (e.g. the player can

meet a group of aborigines at a certain location, whichdoes not exist in reality).

The ncoML framework keeps track of the player’sphysical position and maps it to the position within thegame, while supplying him or her with corresponding (si-mulation) information. This localization technique fo-cuses on the enrichment of the reality with additional dataand does not directly influence in-game characteristics.This is done implicitly by the users, whose actions are go-verned by the information he perceives or is shown by theframework.

IV. EXPERIENCES S A. UbiQuest

During the tests within the simulation environmentusing scripted building strategies and moving accordingto a mobility source adapted from the random waypointmodel, no abnormal system behavior was detected. Afterporting and testing the software on the PDA devices thefirst real but expected problems were encountered. In thenear “perfect” virtual environment, we had constant com-munication ranges of the devices. In the “real” world,every infrastructural change in the environment influ-enced the communication capabilities of the devices aswell. Due to multi-user interference, shadowing in the

network etc., close-by neighboring devices were some-times not even discovered by the beaconing protocol.

The reception of GPS signals posed another challenge.Location awareness was integrated using GPS receiverswithout the more modern SIRFstar III chipset which re-

sulted in deviations of the devices from their original lo-cation, slow updates (more than 30m range and latencyvalues of more than several seconds) and black spots,caused e.g. by shadowing. Since location awareness wasimplemented using GPS receivers, only outdoor usagewas possible. For indoor use, WLAN signal strength tri-angulation techniques have been conceptualized but werenot implemented.

Finally, due to resource restrictions only five PDAswere available for the field tests. Fortunately, the feed-back from the testers were positive. The integration of thephysical location into the game was a feature appreciated.Though “increased population growth” did not motivatethe players to really position themselves in the mentioned“positive” areas, the general idea of location immersionin ubiquitous games and applications in general washighly approved.

B. ncoMLNcoML has been tested currently only with military

personnel. Using it with a game scenario and a totally dif-ferent group of users in the context of the children’s uni-versity will be an interesting experiment. The results sofar show, that simulating movement in an office environ-ment and physical movement through an exercise areawith augmented information really does make a dif-

ference. Though in the simulated world the movementspeed, as well as the special behavior of the individualuser have been adapted, all test results in a real environ-ment show a significant (positive) decrease in missiontime [Fig. 5]. The trainees do not have to make any ne-cessary abstractions, but can concentrate directly on themission success ahead of them.

Other results from the simulation with a smaller scena-rio show that mission success increased drastically by uti-lizing higher collaborative levels: Alone the ability tocommunicate in a bidirectional way decreased missiontime by nearly 33%; introduction of additional collabora-tive tools like white board functionality, etc. again nearly

halved the mission time. [Fig. 6].Technical results were less promising though. Using a

level training area without any obstacles yielded the bestcommunication results. As expected, buildings, trees andother obstacles influenced the WLAN connectivity bet-ween the different devices drastically, resulting in smallercommunication radii and connection losses due to inter-ferences and shadowing. Field tests have been performedwith FujitsuSiemens Tablet PCs with integrated WLANand Bluetooth Holux GPSlim 236 receivers. Since theoriginal ncoML framework has been developed for out-door usage, no indoor localization methods have beenexamined.





Figure 5. Comparison of simulated an real field test results

Figure 6. Relationship collaboration level – mission time

V. M IDDLEWARE CONCEPT

JANE is a simulation environment for multi-hop adhoc networks (MANETs) [6, 7], comparable to Ns/2 [8]or GloMoSim/QualNet [9, 10] which has been developedat the University of Trier. It provides network developerswith a middleware, which can be used to easily imple-ment protocols and applications. The key ingredients of JANE are component based design and asynchronouscommunication between these components. This ap-proach has been chosen because the traditional view of the network stack and synchronous communications doesnot fit well in a highly dynamic ad hoc network.

Within JANE every component is a service. This is va-lid for applications and basic middleware services, aswell as for routing algorithms and even hardware compo-nents (e.g. a GPS receiver). Services cannot be accesseddirectly though - this is accomplished by an event-basedcommunication pattern, supplied by an abstracted oper-ating system, which provides service management and –interaction, event execution management and timeout ma-nagement.

A network simulated in JANE is implemented as a setof services and event handling objects. The network itself is represented on the link layer OSI-level. It provides

basic asynchronous message oriented unicast- and broad-cast communication with direct neighbors in an ad hocenvironment. Besides a collision free and a shared net-work, the detailed implementation of an IEEE 802.11MAC protocol is available too.

Atop of the chosen network, JANE provides a genericrouting framework, allowing the network developer toimplement, combine and test existing as well as new rou-ting services according to his or hers research interests,e.g. by combining DSR with geographic greedy routing[11].

Development of mobile applications using JANE as si-mulation environment or middleware component followsa 3-tier development process. The first is the implementa-tion within the “pure” simulation environment. Since themain purpose of JANE is to support developers in imple-menting applications in an ad hoc environment, it allowsto connect real hardware in a hybrid-mode [Fig. 5] aswell. Here real world devices, like PDAs or Tablet-PCsthat are physically connected to the simulation server canbe transparently merged into the simulated environment,while the integrated middleware e.g. emulates WLAN802.11 within a local area network. The only new soft-ware modules that have to be developed within this se-cond development step are the necessary user interfacesfor direct interaction with the system.

To use the hybrid mode, every physical device has tobe mapped to a simulated device. Messages destined tothe virtual device will be transparently forwarded to thereal world device. Technically, these connections arerealized using JAVA RMI (Remote Method Invocation),allowing to connect “external” devices on any physicallyattached network.

Figure 7. The JANE HybridMode

Figure 8. The JANE Platform Mode

00:00:00

00:07:12

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6

Simulation

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JANE SimulationEnvironment

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Mobile Device

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Mobile Device

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Mobile Device

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For complete integration of real devices and as the laststep in a development process, JANE offers a so-calledplatform mode, which can act as a middleware for multi-hop ad hoc networks as shown in Fig. 6. Since a graphicaluser interface has already been developed for the hybrid

mode, porting applications to real devices is an easy andfast endeavor.

As mentioned above, all applications (UbiQuest andncoML) have been developed within the simulation envi-ronment and subsequently have been ported to useJANEs hybrid-mode. Additionally UbiQuest has been im-plemented and field-tested on GPS-and WLAN equippedPDAs using the JANE platform mode.

VI. RELATED WORK

In the domain of location-aware ubiquitous games, se-veral projects with different objectives are currently re-

searched. They differ in the type of location awarenessused, ranging from augmented- and mixed reality to loca-tion immersion techniques. Additionally they can be clas-sified by the technical implementation of location aware-ness. Many projects are using GPS receivers for positio-ning, but RFID, IR-barks and triangulation technologiesare also common – especially for indoor applications. Afew systems are combining different types of technolo-gies. The communication capabilities are heterogeneousas well, ranging from close range ad hoc Bluetooth-, overWLAN- to the integration of hybrid and larger infra-structural networks, via GPRS, UMTS, etc. The most of-ten used platforms for pervasive games are subdivided

between handheld/PDA-sized devices down to mobilephone which gain more and more functionality each day.The other end is characterized by Tablet-PCs, sub-note-books, UMPCs and portable gaming platforms (e.g. Play-station Portable).

Prominent projects regarding ubiquitous games are“Uncle Roy all around you” and its predecessor “Can yousee me now” [12, 13, 14]. Both games are played out-doors and are using GPS devices respectively manual po-sitioning and are a mixture between reality- and onlinegame, dealing with a portation of the well-known child-ren’s game “Catch me if you can”. Communicationmeans are WLAN respectively GRPS-able PDAs.

Catchbob! [15, 16] is a collaborative game, in whichgroups of three persons have to locate a virtual object onthe Lausanne University campus. It runs on WLANenabled Pocket- and Tablet PCs and uses SOAP tocommunicate game data with a central university server.

An early pervasive adaption of an existing “normal”strategy game is “Pirates!” which is played indoors on aPDA and uses special close-range transmitters for loca-tion awareness (allowing only relative localization) andWLAN communication [17, 18].

A project based on even higher technical prerequisitesin the realm of augmented reality is “Human Pacman”,where the player wears a head-mounted display, provi-

ding him with information about virtual cookies he has togather and ghosts he has to avoid, while physically walk-ing or running though a virtual environment [19]. Com-munication means here are Bluetooth and WLAN. In

New York a less technically demanding version of thisidea was life tested in 2004 [20]. Information about posi-tion and ghosts/cookies was here communicated “primi-tively” via mobile phones.

GeoCaching [21] is the hunt for a hidden “treasure” for

which only real world coordinates are available, but notthe exact location, using only a GPS receiver. Though itdoes not necessarily require a ubiquitous computer device(and thus not necessarily fitting the description of a ubi-quitous computer game) it nonetheless can beimplemented perfectly on mobile devices combiningmap- and GPS functionality.

Mogi [22] is a typical example for ubiquitous gamehype in Japan for several years, though it is just a “sim-ple” collection and communication game. It uses GPS aswell as cell-based localization services and runs on mo-bile phones.

VII. CONCLUSION

This paper presented two location aware ubiquitousgames for multi-hop ad hoc networks. Though both areusing location awareness as a new feature within thegame, both are using it in different ways. For applicationdevelopment, the scope and planned deployment settinggoverns how to integrate location awareness into them.This always is a specific decision and not every applica-tion can take advantage of these available new features.

Technically it is possible to integrate localization ser-vices of the different kinds into ubiquitous games, thoughsome aspects still require additional in-depth research.

Most applications only concentrate on one specific tech-nology, though especially the transition from in- to out-door scenarios and vice-versa is an interesting and chal-lenging task. The same is valid for the networking capa-bilities. Different physical situations might provide hy-brid networks, not only relying on ad hoc WLAN con-nections that could be used for in-game communicationsas well. An interesting approach for that is e.g. the perva-sive game UbiSettlers, developed by the University of Luxembourg [23] which intelligently combines ad hocand infrastructural communication means.

In general using location based services within ubiqui-tous games is not only a feature which is technically pos-

sible, but which provides new game content, interactionpossibilities, physical movement and last but not least fun– the most important ingredient in a mobile game.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to thank Prof. Rothkugel (ComputerScience Department of the University of Luxembourg)for providing additional hardware resources. This work was supported in part by the German Airforce Office(ncoML).

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Alexander Höhfeld was born 1975 in Erlangen/Germanyand graduated in computer science at the University of the Fe-deral Armed Forces in Munich/Germany, focusing on opera-tions research and self-organization, receiving his diploma in1999.

He is a former German Air Force Officer who has been wor-king in Germany, the Baltic States and the US in the develop-ment of military software for Germany and the NATO. Afterhaving finished his military career in 2006 he began writing hisPh.D. thesis at the University of Trier, where he is currentlyworking in the computer science department/system softwareand distributed systems. His professional interests include self-organized and distributed systems, e/m-learning, MANETs,ubiquitous computing and the 3D-Internet.

Mr. Höhfeld is member of the German computer society GI(“Gesellschaft für Informatik”).



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