Context
Several “Play Theory” social experiments and other Alternate Reality Games have revealed that human behavior can be channeled to a better experience though play propositions. It is our purpose for this project to explore the realm of posibility opened when we consider game design as a strategy for breathing life back into mostly passive cultural heritage sites.
In this project we want to design a Pervasive Games platform based on augmented reality techniques for using mobile devices, space QR tagging, positioning and orientation, together with other contextual services (time of day, weather, temperature, social vicinity, ongoing activities, etc.) to help users play or enact games in real space.
The mobile phone can become a metamorphic object assuming the function/representation of a “prompt”, a “tricorder”, a “magnifying glass”, a “time machine”, a “telescope”, an “astrolabe”, a “papirus”, etc or any other object in a game or in a play.
A mobile interface (Android or iPhone) would enable game exploration in context. An online subscription service would enable editing, distribution and computation of such game contexts, as well as the end-user anotation and extension of basic services with other contextualy relevant proposals and links.
Objective
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim to design and build a working prototype for an online game service and mobile interface that could be used to create augmented reality games for enhancing the experience of cultural heritage sites.
Plan
This project run as an internship at the GSI/CISUC and was developed by Ivo Cosme as part of his MEI dissertation work, until he started working on the Adventure Project, as an evolution of this initial plan.
Interactive Membranes
Folowing the initial development of a distributed ARG multiplayer insfrastructure, a project follow up was initiated to work on a general purpose portable ARG interface building kit.
A demo for a system for drag&drop based, quick building of AR interfaces was designed and built by Pedro Santa, on top of the Marmalade library.