This article is a short overviewt of the neXus project, Pieter Diepenmaat's master thesis project in Industrial Design Engineering at Hewlett Packard Labs and the IDStudiolab at Delft Technical University. A comprehensive overview of the project can be found in the downloadable version of the neXus’ HP tech report.
Take a look at pages from
the neXus thesis
Imagine small virtual game characters that can hide behind a newspaper kiosk and treasures that can be found on the roof of a skyscraper… Future mediascapes, including LBGs, will offer a closer relationship between the physical and virtual world, due to more accurate location sensing (including direction sensing) and more precise virtual representation of the physical world. Sensor fusion, which combines improved location sensors (like GPS) with additional sensor input (accelerometers and compass) and evolved use models, will improve location-sensing accuracy of players from 10-5 to 3-1 meters. The players’ avatars will exist in a virtual world modeled on three-dimensional representation of the physical world. Examples like Google earth and Microsoft’s virtual earth show how quickly these representations of entire cities, which are accessible to anyone, are evolving.
Another major step in improving the merger of the virtual and physical world will be the addition of sensing the player’s orientation to sensing his location. With this in place future mediascapes will lose the need for players to look at an interactive map to help them locate virtual elements. In the ultimate future mixed reality device sensor data from both sensors will be combined to provide players with a full visual augmented reality. Players will see both the physical and virtual part of the mixed reality at the same time. Unfortunately this will not be feasible in a mass produced product within the next five years. An interesting and also feasible alternative is using 3D audio. This spatial audio, like used in the game DEMOR, has the ability to make a virtual world come to live while allowing visitors to locate and navigate to virtual elements like treasures and game characters.
Similar to current video games it can be expected that these virtual objects and characters that will become more lifelike with the use of artificial intelligence. This leads to a dynamic virtual world that already adapts to the changing context of use (see part 2 of this article), and which will become even more dynamic with the continuing trend of enticing visitors to become co-authors by changing and adding virtual content.
All in all, future mediascapes will evolve from a relative static collection of media that is roughly mapped to the physical world, into more closely mapped dynamic virtual worlds that change constantly. Instead of switching between the virtual and physical world to navigate to a virtual element, visitors will be able to locate the element by ear and negotiate the physical world by eye. This opens up new possibilities to mediascape developers who by then will have an additional 5 years of experience in mixing the two realities into compelling experiences.
But when developing future mediascape or device concepts based on this vision we need to be aware that in spite of all the possibilities, mediascapes developers will still need to deal with uncertainty in location sensing and scale differences similar to current mediascapes. The sensing of a player’s location will still be subject to jitter and location accuracy being 1-3 meters will result in the avatar being larger than its player.
The number of mediascapes and other locations based services together with the number of location aware devices will rapidly increase within the next five years, due to cheaper and smaller GPS sensors incorporated in most mobile devices. LBGs and other mediascapes, will be played on for instance mobile phones, PDAs, portable game consoles and car navigation systems, most of which will use only basic location sensing (no direction sensing). As with the current use of PDAs, the fact that most of them are designed for static and passive dynamic mobility will reflect on the type of LBGs that will emerge on these devices. Players will move to a specific location, interact with the device (solve a situated puzzle and receive a clue, for instance) and move to a new location (using the clue) before interacting with the device again.
In order to be successful, the neXus needs to differentiate itself from other location aware devices by facilitating better or different LBG experiences. By optimizing the neXus for making game decisions while running it moves away from treasure hunt and other types of static mobility gaming experiences and facilitates ‘running LBGing’ experiences which are closer to playground games and sports. Since currently, no LBG or LBG concept exists that make full use of the described potential of future technology developments, the development of the neXus included the development of a collection of ‘running LBG’ ideas and concepts. A running LBG concept called ‘Captivate the Crowd’, that incorporated many of the ideas present in the collection, was also used in the following concept video to show people playing this game using the neXus.
