Julian Bleecker

The workshop I organized at the Ubicomp (Ubiquitous Computing) conference here in Tokyo is on the topic of ubiquitous computing, games and entertainment.

Most of the presentations are available on the Workshop page, in some format - PDF, PPT, etc.

http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5

The main workshop page is http://ubicomp.techkwondo.com and if you poke through to http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5 you'll find copies of the presentations. Many are relevant to our location-based mobile media course. Some aren't directly related, but are useful to look at because they represent some of the fascinating directions that are being explored in the area of ubiquitous and pervasive games and entertainment.

Matthew Chalmer's gave a paper on Castles, a new prototype game from the UK-based Equator Project

Benjamin Joffe's paper on Mogi. http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/BJ - Ubicomp2005 - Mogi.ppt

Superstar is a game that Areacode developed for the Workshop that will be running in Tokyo for about the next six weeks. It's a real mobile phone game using photo stickers (I forgot the , that's a collection-oriented game that uses the camera phone to capture stickers of other players with points distributed in a cooperative social pyramid. You're a Superstar when lots of people collect your photo sticky that they find around town. Those who collect your photo get points, as do you, as do everyone else whose photo _you_ have collected, with diminishing points based on how far down your collection hierarchy your connected network is.

Daniel Ashbrook had an interesting project on a kind of mobile version of Dance Dance Revolution using Bluetooth Accelerometers connected to cell phones.

Kaho Abe, a grad student at Parsons School developed a very cool, very kinesthetic game called Hit Me! inspired by a mash-up of Sumo and Twiser and Dance Dance Revolution that includes Snoopy-esque headgear.

http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/hitme_presentation_ubicomp.pdf

Anita Wilhelm from Caterpillar Mobile discussed a game developed out of her and Jeff Towle's graduate project at UC Berkeley's SIMS program at the intersection of mobile gaming, photo sharing and social networking. It's a start-up, so it was a bit hush-hush, sadly, but there are some interesting nuggets in their motivation, including this: "Instead of thinking about virtual games and how to make them fit the small screen. We like to think about games we played when we were younger and how to bring part of them to the virtual world" http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/CaterpillarMobilePrez.ppt

Hiroyuki Tarumi presented an overview of a developing virtual-physical persistent world experience in which users with mobile phones working in real world can experience virtual cities according to their locations in the real world.

Koji Yatani, a graduate student at Tokyo University presented ARHunter: A multiplayer game using gestural input - a souped-up whack-a-mole game. http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/ARHunter.ppt

Steffen P. Walz presented on serious pervasive games for sentient architectures. Steffen believes that games are about learning. http://wiki.caad.hbt.arch.ethz.ch/twiki/bin/view/Gamearch http://www.madcountdown.de Massively Multiplayer Audio Reality Gaming (including use of radio drama methods). http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/walz_ubicomp_workshop.pdf