CatchBob! now has its own logo, a poor google ranking of 24 and is in its final beta development. This game is intended to be used a testbed for my phd thesis experiments (modelling coordination, and how space is used as a resource for collaboration). I work on it with Fab and vogi

CatchBob! is a mobile game in which groups of 3 team-mates have to solve a joint task. The aim of the game for the participants is to find a virtual object on the campus and circled it with a triangle. They are provided with a location-based tools running on an iPAQ. This tool allow each person to see the location of his or her partners with a colored dot on the campus map. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the location awareness tool. Another meaningful piece of information given by this tool is whether the user is close or far from the object. This proximity sensor corresponds to the fact that the person is closer or further from the object since his or her last connection to the network. In addition, the tool also enable simple communication: if a participant points on a dot (representing a person) with his stylus, (s)he can draw a vector that correspond to a direction proposition for his/her partner: going in this direction.

The team comes at our lab and we describe them the purpose of the game as well as the instructions, They have 5 minutes to discuss a strategy and then have to go on the field and find the object. The only way they could communicate is the semi structured communication tool. They leave their cell phones at the lab. They have to coordinate with each other in order to catch this object and circled it with a triangle.

Users also have to press a "refresh" button in order to get a new representation of the map, the whereabouts of the partners and to send information about direction to their team-mates.