Using a Camera Phone as a Mixed‐Reality Laser Cannon

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity and rich features of current mobile phones, mobile games have failed to reach even the lowest estimates of expected revenues. This is unfortunate as mobile phones offer unique possibilities for creating games aimed at attracting demographics not currently catered for by the traditional console market. As a result, there has been a growing call for greater innovation within the mobile games industry and support for games outside the current console genres. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel location-based game which allows us turn a camera phone into a mixed-reality laser cannon. The game uses specially designed coloured tags, which are worn by the players, and advanced colour tracking software running on a camera phone, to create a novel first person shoot-em-up (FPS) with innovative game interactions and play.

Designing Seamless Mobile Augmented Reality Location Based Game Interfaces

“…Visionbased AR has also seen many examples of playful experiences within the research community ranging from single, to multiplayer games. An example of single player AR game is a laser tag style game [3]. Additionally, games integrating multiplayer aspects have also emerged, such examples are: AR Tennis [8], Cows vs. Aliens [16] and MapLens [15].…”

Mapping the Beach Beneath the Street: Digital Cartography for the Playable City

“…The most well known of the early GPS games is arguably Mogi from Newt Games, which achieved notable success in Japan (Licoppe and Inada, 2008). Other early games experimented with implied location solutions where players interacted with objects or systems that have a known location using such things as NFC , Bluetooth beacons (Rashid et al, 2005), and visual markers (Chehimi et al, 2008).…”