Course

Implementing Story and Entertainment Projects for Mobile Phones

The objective of this course is for students to develop a strong sense of the design challenges and opportunities presented by mobile technologies. Through readings, discussions, and hands-on development students will develop critical and pragmatic insights into designing mobile experiences and technology. Students will form design groups to execute a mobile project design using the principles from readings and class discussions.

Implementation Topic Weeks: Students will develop an overview and some hands-on experience designing applications for a mobile phone.

• We will learn how to develop an interactive voice-response, voice-recognition game using VXML (Voice XML), a simple technology for creating phone-based interaction systems. The technology is similar to that used for the EA game "Majestic" including voice recognition, voice-based web pages, touch-tone phone based interactive games, capture of phone call audio, outbound calling (i.e. initiate a call to another phone).
• How to use SMS (short message service) systems for interactive applications, games and other usage scenarios. Send SMS, receive and process SMS, use SMS as a "trigger" for other events on and offline.
• Learn the fundamentals of developing mobile phone-based applications using J2ME, an environment that supports developing games and other applications for many mobile phones.
• Learn how to integrate external hardware to a mobile phone over a Bluetooth connection. This can make your mobile phone "talk" to a GPS, for example, or other external hardware (e.g. pedometer, compass, light sensor, etc.)

Projects: Each student will be required to participate in developing a final project for the course.

Project Ideas: Some ideas, by no means exhaustive, for final projects include:

• A mobile phone version of the parlor game "Telephone" (aka "Chinese Whispers") using VXML and SMS.
• A multiplayer, location-aware J2ME mobile phone version of a treasure hunt game
• A application that translates an SMS message through text-to-speech for delivery to a non-SMS enabled (e.g. home) phone.

Instructor: Julian Bleecker (bleecker at usc dot edu)