Marc Tuters

Design Document

Hunter/Gatherer is an proposal for a collaboration between the IMD and Adrian Cheok's Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore to develop a set of technology and a platform for mixed reality gaming. Hunter/Gatherer itself is a particular application of said techno-platform in which game-play is modeled on an ecological scenario.

Overview
In essence, Hunter/Gatherer is a wireless game in which players take the point of view of two animals: a mouse (the gatherer) and a bird (the hunter). The primary purpose of the game is to function as a publicly accessible, dynamic gaming environment for children and adults to learn about about ecology and biology.

Hunter Experience: (USC)

Hunter/Gatherer also seeks to develop a sophisticated VR haptic interface specifically designed for a CAVE-type interface. This component of the project, seeks to create a haptic interface through which the hawk character interfaces with the Hunter/Gatherer game. Using the Immersive Lab's CAVE interface a player could then fly-over geo-rectified LYDAR model of campus (utilized by the Chojo project) in the role of the airborne predator. The immersive lab at USC will develop the flight interface together with mentorship by Professors Perry Hoberman and Mark Bolas (as part of a study in interfacing with the "Cloud game" currently being developed in the department).

The Gatherer Experience (MRL):

The Gatherer aspect of the game will be developed in collaboration with researchers from Adrian Cheok's Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore. From the Gatherer's point of view, the game is presented in the form of a meta narrative about the animal gathering food and construction materials, in order to build its nest, and avoid predation.

Spatialized Sound:
Since mice are primarily accoustically attuned, the Gatherer's experience relies heavily on the use spatialized to augment the outdoor world through a location-aware acoustic device (by which the mouse hears the location of the virtual bird in the sky above). As a general rule, the gaming experience should be as unobtrusive as possible. The Gatherer's technology is thus hidden in a a plush "animal hat" which incorporates a portable computer, earphones, a gps chipset, binaural microphones, a high-speed network card (preferably using the GPRS cell network), and an orientation tracker for (rho, gamma, theta) for which Prof Cheok suggests the InertiaCube http://www.intersense.com/products/prec/ic2/index.htm of which he has several in his lab that were used for projects such as Human Pacman.

Location-based narrative (IMD + MRL)
As another element of the game the project is discussing using tablet PC's (equipped with the same relative and absolute location-awareness to locate data on campus for the Gatherer to collect. With one of these tablet PCs, the players would be able to then "gather" information that has been location-encoded to specific locations around campus. The Gatherer seeks artifacts that would represent a native animal's food and building materials. Said artifacts are described on a wireless handheld device through text and image. When a player has successfully identified a given artifact (s)he collects a virtual avatar of the object (leaving real-world artifacts untouched). An appropriate collection of avatars contributes to a player's success in the game. Under the mentorship of Prof Julian Bleecker the interface display on the tablet would be designed to change according to orientation from a map view when held horizonally to an "augmented reality" screenshot of the players relative location on the VR model, when held vertically. Prof Bleecker has been working on such a display for his Visa Vie game which has an integrated accelerometer which tracks 6 degrees of movement ED is this redundant if we have good GPS?.

A Seamfull Game
In addition to simply gathering food, players must avoid predation by virtual predators that are connected to a player via her sensor output --when a player connects to GPS (s)he becomes visible to an airborne predator and when a player stays for long enough in a single location, (s)he leaves biometric data (a pellet) that can be sniffed by a ground predator. While GPS works very well at sea or on the open road, it could be unreliable on campus. Using a tiny receiver chip to listen for GPS satellites, the mobile client device attempts to communicate a player's location to the database. When a clear satellite fix can not be established, the player's exact location becomes increasingly uncertain. One of the greatest frustration for locative applications has thus been in the fact that GPS only functions well when there is a clear view of the sky. Similar to Chalmers' "Seamful Game" http://www.seamful.com/, Hunter Gather however builds this weakness into the game's strategy. Unlike other location-aware games the strategy for the player does not, in fact, want her location to be accurately transmitted to the database, as this makes her visible to the games virtual predators. Players thus prefer to stay sheltered from the sky. Sometimes, however, the game requires for the players to emerge from the forest, in order, for example, to collect some specific artifact.

D-GPS.
In collaboration with the MRL, the project also looks to experiment with errecting psuedolites on campus to create a dramtically improved locatione awareness through what is refered to as differential-GPS.