Matt Adams PICNIC07

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www.blasttheory.co.uk

Matt Adams

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Can You See Me Now? (2001)

Today and tomorrow 4-7pm

Spiegeltent or at www.canyouseemenow.co.uk

QuickTime™ and aSorenson Video decompressorare needed to see this picture.

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• Can You See Me Now? and many other pervasive games use the cityscape as a field of play but don’t make use of the social and political complexities present

• Subsequent games like Uncle Roy All Around You use small areas of the city and very tightly authored content to address this

• Those games are incredibly challenging to build and don’t scale

• In short, can we build games that spring from the meaning of a place?

Challenge

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RIDER SPOKE

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RIDER SPOKE

in collaboration with

Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham

Sony Net Services

As part of the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

an EU funded research project of 9 partners

Launches on 11th October at the Barbican in London

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Game description

• Come to the Barbican on your own bike or borrow one

• After a short briefing head out onto the streets with a Nokia Internet Tablet mounted on the handlebars

• Receive a question and then look for a valid place to hide your answer

• Once there, record your answer onto the device

• Then either receive another question or start to seek other people’s answers

• To seek others, you can choose from a selection of nearby answers

• Your proximity is reported as a number of ‘hops’ to the location of your selected answer

• The game lasts an hour

RIDER SPOKE

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Artistic motivations

• An enquiry into performance in the age of personal communication

• How do games create new social spaces?

• Where might theatre be sited and what form might it take?

• It invites the public to be co-authors of the work and a visible manifestation of it as they cycle through city

• It locates the venue precisely in its local context and invites the audience to explore that context for its emotional and intellectual resonances.

RIDER SPOKE

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Questions

• Rider Spoke makes use of solitude, cycling and the city at night as spaces for reflection. It poses questions to the participants that may prompt them to articulate things previously unspoken.

• Structure of the questions is still under review but an example might be:

• “I want you to look for a flat or a house and find a window that you would want to go through. I want you to stare into that window and tell me what you see and tell me why you want to go through that window.”

RIDER SPOKE

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Technical

• WiFi positioning

• Fingerprinting: combining visible Access Points to create a ‘position’

• Thresholding: discarding all but the strongest APs

• Fuzzy matching: allowing a fingerprint to be subsequently visible if a given percentage of the APs are visible.

• Graph modelling

• Building a model of adjacencies that evolves during the game

• Uses GPS data from some players to refine positioning

• Helps to predict number of hops between fingerprints

• Serves as a visualisation tool for analysis and game mastering

RIDER SPOKE

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Interface

• Dozens of iterations since March

• Key design influences are Mexican Votive Paintings, Sailor Tattoos and Heraldry:

• Invocations, requests, prayers, thanks

• Badges of identity

• Historical signs of permanence

• Semantically very dense: e.g. swallows are signifiers of being a true sailor, of nearby land, of home.

RIDER SPOKE

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Interface design

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Interface design

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Interface design

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Interface design

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Remaining research challenges

• How do we prioritise good content over garbage?

• Offline synchronisation: database is updated over night, conflicts need resolving

• Fingerprints are unstable and may vanish too often

• Granularity of fingerprints:

• Need to be big enough to be made of many, strong, reliable Access Points

• Need to be be small enough to put the user in the ‘right’ place

RIDER SPOKE

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Conclusion

• Rider Spoke breaks ground in a number of areas

• World’s first pervasive game for cyclists

• Tight relationship between location and content

• That relationship is user generated

• Game can be rolled out anywhere quickly

• Migration to PSP or other commercial games consoles is straightforward

• Safety, insurance and ethics issues are key research issues

RIDER SPOKE

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www.blasttheory.co.uk