In and out of Reality: Janus-Faced Location Awareness in Ubiquitous Games

Abstract

Many future ubiquitous devices will be able to determine their precise physical position using different types of localization techniques (e.g. GPS antennas for outdoor-, RFID tags, infrared beacons or triangulation etc. in indoor settings). Especially for games in a mobile environment usage of the devices, respectively player’s location will capacitate new game functionality and content. Location Awareness in this context is twofold though, corresponding to the games’ focus: Either the player’s actions can be influenced by providing additional information according to the devices physical location (augmented or mixed reality) or location awareness directly or indirectly alters content and state of the game (location immersion). This work focuses on the presentation of two ubiquitous strategy games, which are based on the same uniform middleware for MANETs, implementing the above mentioned different forms of location awareness.