Six in the city: introducing Real Tournament - a mobile IPv6 based context-aware multiplayer game

Mitchell, Keith and McCaffery, Duncan and Metaxas, George and Finney, Joseph and Schmid, Stefan and Scott, Andrew (2003) Six in the city: introducing Real Tournament - a mobile IPv6 based context-aware multiplayer game. In: NetGames '03: Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games. ACM, New York, pp. 91-100. ISBN 1-58113-734-6

Abstract

It is rapidly becoming clear that entertainment will be one of the killer applications of future wireless networks. More specifically mobile gaming is predicted to be worth $1.2 billion by the year 2006 to providers in the U.S. alone [20]. The driving force behind this is the introduction of powerful feature rich handsets and ubiquitous access to high performance wireless networks. However, mobile applications face issues that are subtly different from fixed network applications, including fluctuating connectivity, network QoS and host mobility issues. To investigate the requirements of future mobile applications we have deployed a wireless MAN consisting of GPRS and IEEE 802.11 hotspots based on Mobile IPv6 around the city of Lancaster and have built an augmented reality game designed to evaluate future mobile application requirements.In this paper we introduce Real Tournament, a prototype multi-player mobile game, which uses handheld computers augmented with an array of sensors to enable true mobile interaction in a real-world environment. We then evaluate current approaches to real-time interaction and follow by outlining our own architecture more suited to wireless environments and based on the peer-to-peer approach. The approach provides adaptation, shared state, and consistency mechanisms in order to provide support for scalable, low latency, soft real time mobile applications.