Songs of North: a mobile, location-aware multiplayer game

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Songs of North (link might be broken) is a location based game described by Franz Mayra (int the Receiver) as:

a mobile, location-aware multiplayer game with a theme and game world resonating with elements of Nordic myths and shamanism. The restrictions of the mobile device as a gaming interface are here translated into design solutions that actually turn such shortcomings to advantage. For example, the mobile game deck is conceptualised as a shamanic drum that operates as a window into the 'other reality' – that of the spirit realm where normally invisible friends or foes can be perceived and communicated with. Rather than focusing the player on the small screen, which really cannot compete with the experience that contemporary PCs and big-screen televisions are offering, the game immerses players into a rich audio world where wolves howl and eagles screech. The mobile device can even stay in the pocket of a player who journeys through the streets as an urban shaman, simultaneously inhabiting not only the city of brick and stone but also a fictional overlay of a Nordic spiritual realm via the cues of a hands-free headset, which continuously whispers sound information into her ear.

This idea seems nice! It's developed by Tampere's University Game Research Lab.

Pervsive game research

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The city shaman dances with virtual wolves – researching pervasive mobile gaming by Frans Mäyrä is an interesting accoung about pervasive games in Vodafone's receiver. Some excerpts:

Study of games is rather new in most universities, and that of mobile games even more so. Games have been a sort of blind spot for both human sciences and humanistic scholarship. (...) When games break away from computers and consoles, their boundaries become even harder to see and the nature of the game even harder to define. Yet this is exactly where researchers are currently focusing. (...) Mobile games are an important research field for the GameLab for numerous reasons. Mobile terminals are by their nature context-aware: the service provider gets information both about who the user is and where she is. That kind of contextual information is at the core of all traditional games, but has mostly been missing from digital games (...) The possibilities for new game mechanics, taking advantage of the full range of contextual information provided by pervasive systems, expand the research and design space further. This is one of the major research directions being explored by some ongoing projects in the Tampere GameLab. (...) It now appears that in order to understand the principles of the design of mobile pervasive games we first have to study ourselves. What is reality? How can we create and maintain multiple worlds or realities simultaneously in our minds, and negotiate between them as we cross from one context to another? How much of such multitasking can we tolerate and even enjoy before the associated cognitive demands change from refreshing and stimulating into stressful and confusing? Research into the ethics and information ergonomics for pervasive mobile games is still at an early phase, but it looks like the investigation into the future of entertainment will yield some important lessons about human nature.

Retro phones of the future

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I am late on this but I like the idea: Pokia proposes interesting retro phones interface to be plugged into your bleeding edge cell phone! I find this interesting since mobile tech (as a subset of technology in general) is sometimes frightening for lots of users, here they offer a funny way to get back to the past. I would like to know more about current use of those old-school handset!!!

The use of social software and activity theory

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I really appreciate zengestrom's take about sociale software. He adresses the use of thos services. This question always bugged me. The starting point of his discussion is the fact that some people (like russell beattie are linking out of such services.

the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (like I do) instead of social networks.

It's indeed very relevant to connect this to the activity theory since it underline the very notion of 'objects' or goals that people want to achive by performing an activity (in this context, registering, logging and linking). He quotes examples of object-oriented social software that are obviously successful like:

Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.

He also points the problem with FOAF:

Sometimes the 'social just means people' fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together.

And even though I agree with this from the activity theory point of view, I would argue that FOAF should not be seen as a service but instead as an architecture on which designers can rely to design services. It might be possible to design object-based social software using the FOAF XML grammar. Other interesting things about this in his post!

Blisterent: an LBS company

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Blisterent "is developing and publishing mobile location–based games and entertainment products to wireless carriers around the world." They have their own location application platform called LAP:

The LAP provides mobile content developers with an efficient and simple way to deliver their products to mobile operators. In turn, the mobile operators now have access to a location platform that can help expand their product offering to customers by increasing data traffic on their networks. The LAP provides these companies with new technology and more product distribution channels.

In terms of games, they developed the game Swordfish I already mentioned here.

The bluetooth rifle

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(via), the bluetooth rifle by USC student John Hering:

John Hering, a student at the University of Southern California, has developed the BlueSniper rifle, a tool that looks like a big gun which can "attack" a wireless device from more than a mile away -- several times the 328-foot maximum range of Bluetooth.

Hering, cofounder of a wireless security think tank called Flexilis, says he uses the "rifle" only to determine security vulnerabilities, not to actually hack wireless devices to obtain personal information. (...) Hering says his goal is to boost awareness of the vulnerabilities in Bluetooth. But in laboratory testing, Hering says, his company has been able to access SMS messages, passwords, phonebook contacts and camera phone photos from Bluetooth-enabled phones.

And now... old devices like the first mobile telephone

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Of course my favorite part concerned the devices, especially with regard to the design POV: how earlier designers thought about the affordances, the design, the forms, the colors... Here area few devices:Bell's phone: Adler's phone: the first mobile phone: The first Minitel (1983): The first Matra visophone (1982): A Radiocom 2000, a famous french portable phone (not mobile because you cannot put it in your pocket) :

Watching different types of radio waves

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There was also a spectrometer to see a concrete representation of radio waves depending on their wavelength (FM - TV - GSM 900 - DAB - GSM 1800 - UMTS): It reminded me this "Tuneable city" project where people could see a concrete representation of the radio waves in a certain are (here in the exhibit it' just the spectrum at a certain location) but I though it could be nice to have a device to see colored forms (depending on their type (= wavelength). Like for instance red forms for WiFi and blue for UMTS. This might be useful for not so common waves (I don't care to have a representation of FM or GSM which are everywhere).

A dosimeter guy called SAM

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This dummy head is used to calculate dosimetry (according to wikipedia: the measurement of doses in matter and tissue from ionizing radiation); this head is called SAM (acronym of something I forgot). It's made up to measure the SAR = energy absorbed by a body receiving mobile phone emissions. This head adopts the morphology of the human head and is filled with a gel that "possesses the electrical characteristics of the human brain" (vow our head is filled with gel, isn' it?).

Yes it's called "Leaky Feeders"

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The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on. For instance, it's the first time I see this: Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).

Yes it\'s called \"Leaky Feeders\"

in

The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on. For instance, it's the first time I see this: Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).

Mobile games and innovation

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An interesting account in The Guardian about mobile games:

There's a palpable feeling that mobile games are about to go big. Established publishers such as THQ are creating mobile divisions (...) Mobile phone gaming has yet to deliver a killer application. And before it does, the hurdles preventing this burgeoning market from reaching its full potential have to be removed. There are 60m handsets in the UK, 25% of which have colour screens and are capable of playing games. It's a potentially huge market, says iFone's marketing manager, Enda Carey: "The numbers are just frightening — in 12 months, everyone in the UK will have a colour Java-capable phone, and in countries like India and China, the potential is huge".

The article raises the problem of mobile game on cellphones:

When games are available, they often only work on a selection of handsets, which limits the potential audience.

Handsets also often remain "hot" for only a few months, so by the time a game is written — the development cycle is between six and nine months — the handset may be obsolete. And games themselves are not well designed for the phone's form factor, which is by necessity vertical and by preference small, while a game-pad is typically horizontal (...) This is a considerable array of obstacles, but the mobile gaming market is only four years old, and is changing rapidly. The problem of usability is being addressed with innovative form factors, such as Sony Ericsson's S700i, the keypad of which swivels to facilitate the ergonomic advantage of horizontal control combined with a vertical screen.

What is amazin is this:

The games industry wants to extend established console game brands on to mobiles, but figures show users prefer "casual" games, such as Pool and Tetris. (...) iFone has just released Lemmings. It is a port of an old Amiga game that is very addictive and ideally suited to mobile devices. But, says Vout: "Killer apps must be exclusive to a format. Lemmings is basically a clone of the Amiga version, so while it's great, it's not the killer app.

Yes that's what the users want! How to engage them in other scenarios (alternate reality gaming appears to be an interesting option)

14:59

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Nice new concept from the urban dictionnary:14:59: It comes from the "15 minutes of fame" catchphrase coined by Andy Warhol. A celebrity that is 14:59 is on the cusp of losing their relevance and falling out of fame.
"Madonna's attempts to become a children's writer is a sure sign that she has gone 14:59."

Nice conference at EPFL to attend

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"Democratizing Innovation" by Professor Eric von Hippel (MIT)The discussion will be introduced by Professor Christopher Tucci (EPFL) Where: ODYSSEA Building, EPFL When: May 2, from 17:00 to 18:30 (with reception to follow) Eric von Hippel is Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management