geobloggers

Via O’Reilly Radar, via Engadget, via The Raw Feed possibly via The New Scientist but you know, after a certain number of Vias it gets a little hazy.

Backseat Playground is a research project looking at (and indeed) creating an in-car interactive gaming system built from a GPS receiver, handheld computer, headphones and all connected to a laptop hidden out of the way. All the details are covered in the above links and on their own web site. But as always here’s my favorite extract…

Our hypothesis is that a game could be particularly engaging, if it is aware of the vivid and dynamic mobile context. Travelling along a road means a continuous flow of impressions and new situations where changing scenes, sense of motion and contingent encounters provide for a very special experience. It can be seen as a sequential experience, resembling a dramatic play of space and motion, also called i.e.: the highway experience. We suggest that it is possible to engage kids in the journey instead of just focusing on a screen and that the travel experience could be turned into a fun and meaningful activity that is related to the places that are visited along the road.

There’s one bit I don’t quite follow and that bit is no big issue, I’m just interested. They say the game takes an episodic form with a narrative, it also currently takes place on a 35 square kilometer area in Stockholm (and now UK). The bit I’m unsure about is, if events in the narrative are fixed to set locations, if you don’t drive past that location then you don’t get that part of the story. Then what happens if you drive in the reverse direction?

An alternative is that the story-line is fixed from the start, then as you drive along at set intervals the system looks for a suitable upcoming landmark or location onto which to hook an event. It could also context switch, if it knows the players need to find a hidden note, it’ll wait until there’s a radical change in the landscape and tie the note to that change somehow, be it entering into a tunnel, woodland, coast and so on. This makes more sense to me, although you’d need to know the length and duration of the trip before heading out, if you wanted to tell the whole story in one trip.

In the second case you’re not really tied to the 35 kilometer square area, anywhere where you know details about the environment would do. I’m guess that the area chosen has been profiled and details put into some back-end system.

So 3 things I take from this …

1) In a year or two’s time, I’d be really easy to tie this to in-car navigation systems, with some form of subscription model.

2) I’d like to see a hybrid of the two methods of it working that I mention above. The fixed story line that maps to where-ever you happen to be driving and some fixed location features that you physically have to drive to.

Finally …

3) They say (well they say more than this, but these two points anyway) …

• To develop a scalable framework so the game can be implemented on vast road networks - initially in the Stockholm region and in the UK
• To explore designing technologies for a ‘real world’ embedded game engine.

I’m hoping that engine allows users to add their own story elements, some sort of framework for creating in-game objects. Also that you can have some form of interactivity between players, making it possible for players to ‘pick up’ items from one place and ‘drop them off’ at another, for other specified players.

If players 1 always travel from A to B, missing out point C, but there’s an object at point C they need to solve a sub-problem on route A to B, they can ask players 2, Players 2 always travel from D to B via C, can be asked to pick up the item from C and drop it off at point B. Phew, hope that made some kind of sense. Oh and leave messages, etc. etc. But only between White-List approved players that you know.

Once again, what’s interesting to me about this is that the technology is here now, it wouldn’t take a huge amount to hack something like this together. That’s not trying to take anything away from what they’ve done, one someone has done something once, it’s always easier to copy it and do it again. But the point is that the tech is around and accessible now if you really wanted to, as I mentioned with the Nokia Mobile Augmented Reality Application.

ObLastQuote:

As a result of linking the game narratives and properties to the roadside environment, we believe a learning situation will be generated, encouraging children to enquire into local history, and stimulating a dynamic relationship to what they understand by geography.