Wu, Maomao and Mitchell, Keith and McCaffery, Duncan and Finney, Joe and Friday, Adrian (2003) Mobile context-aware game for the next generation. In: 2nd International Conference on Application and Development of Computer Games (ADCOG 2003), 2003-01-06 - 2003-01-07.
Abstract
Traditional networked multiplayer games are typically confined to be played on desktop computers. 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 together to develop mobile networked, context-aware, augmented reality multiplayer games. As part of the new research collaboration between Lancaster University, Cisco Systems, Microsoft Research and Orange – MIPv6 Systems Research Lab (MSRL), such a mobile context-aware multiplayer game is proposed and explored. The proposed game, named Real Tournament, gathers real-time contextual information, e.g., physical location, orientation and other personal facets from the players and injects them into the game arena to generate game events. It is not only the interaction with the virtual game world that drives the game process, but the interaction with the physical world as well. This paper introduces the game scenario that enabled us to explore the features in the aforementioned areas simultaneously. The proposed game architecture and components are described in detail, and the benefits of our architecture are showed by comparison with the existing approaches. The paper also describes the wireless overlay network infrastructure, and demonstrates how the advanced features in Mobile IPv6 are explored during the development of the game. Moreover, a security mechanism is designed at the network-level, and it can be easily utilized for other network services.