Thanks to UMTS, you can now let your cell phone guide you through foreign cities or a merry paper chase. The basis for these new applications is a combination of different mobile technologies on a gaming platform.
Thanks to UMTS, you can now let your cell phone guide you through foreign cities or a merry paper chase. The basis for these new applications is a combination of different mobile technologies on a gaming platform. We all recall the good old paper chase from childhood days. A team of players runs through town marking their route with chalk arrows at each road intersection. With several minutes’ delay, a team of pursuers tracks down the first group. The paper chase is now celebrating its comeback, though chalk arrows are a thing of the past in today’s electronic era. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD in Darmstadt have transferred this popular hare-and-hounds game to the cellular phone. “At various distinctive spots, the first team takes a photograph, which is then geo-coded via GPS and sent to a server,” explains Markus Etz, project manager at IGD. The pursuing team can use GPS to verify this ‘marking’. Once the pursuers have reached the right spot, the server delivers the next photo, which is superimposed in correct positional arrangement on a three-dimensional playing field on the phone’s display. When the first team of players is finally in sight, the pursuing team can ‘catch’ them via Bluetooth. In order to implement this game, the researchers combined various mobile technologies on a gaming platform. These range from positioning technologies such as GPS and Bluetooth detection through to data exchange via Web services and 3-D display of playing fields on the cellular phone. The prototype for the ‘Mobile Chase’ game is now ready and can be used by game developers and telecommunications companies to implement location-based gaming concepts quickly and easily in the future. “Through games like this one, we intend to promote the use of various mobile technologies such as UMTS,” states Etz. Although the paper chase can also be played without UMTS, cell phones will take considerably longer to cope with the vast amount of data involved. However, the platform has yet more possibilities to offer: tourists can use the new software to discover places of interest in a foreign city and to navigate their way from one point to the next, just like a guided tour. “And schools could set up nature trails,” Etz adds as an afterthought. “For example, students could receive a certain number of points for each historic site they visited, then collect a prize at the end.” |
