Innovative Mobile Applications presented in Nokia Games Summit 2007

Innovative mobile applications

Academic participants at Nokia Games Summit 2007,
from top left corner:
Reuben Edwards from Lancaster University,
Oskar Juhlin from from Interactive Institute Sweden,
Paul Coulton from Lancaster University,
Shawn Van Every from New York University,
Greg Trefry from Come Out and Play Festival,
Steffen P. Walz from ETH Zürich,
Mika Tuomola from Helsinki University of Arts and Design,
Ian Bogost from Georgia Tech,
Nina Tammelin and Harri Pennanen from Forum Nokia,
Colleen Macklin from Parsons the New School for Design and
Julian Bleecker from University of Southern California.

Universities serve as one of the most important incubators for mobile software development. Forum Nokia has been working closely with academic researchers, providing them with the tools and knowledge necessary to create and implement innovative mobile applications.

In the world of mobile applications, the words on the street today are sharing and GPS. Combining those two concepts creates powerful, geotagged, user-generated content-sharing solutions. REXplorer and LocoMash are two great examples of what geotagged content applications can do. Both applications were presented at Nokia Games Summit 2007, held in October in Lisbon, Portugal.

REXplorer – an interactive game for tourists

Picture yourself sightseeing in a foreign locale. If you're not the type to join a guided tour, now you can get a completely different tourist experience in the old German city of Regensburg.

Steffen P. Walz from ETH Zürich
was presenting REXplorer
at Nokia Games Summit 2007.

ETH Zurich researcher Steffen P. Walz led a group that developed an interactive mobile and cross-media adventure game called REXplorer, for tourists in the UNESCO world heritage city of Regensburg, Germany. REXplorer is a pervasive and persuasive, scavenger-hunt-like mobile game that helps tourists and visitors experience the city's monuments instead of just seeing them.

The Nokia N70 smartphone as "magic wand"

In the game, tourists act as scientific assistants who help a certain Professor Rex to understand and research Regensburg's "perpetual magic." This magic manifests itself in the form of historical and mythological spirits that are stationed at points of interest throughout the city core. Players rent special "paranormal activity detectors" (or "magic wands"), which house Nokia N70 smartphones and pedestrian GPS receivers. Guided by the GPS navigation application installed on the smartphones, the players are routed to "magic places" — 30 points of interest — where hired actors perform as historical characters. While these actors play their parts, REXplorer players get the audio information they need from the Nokia N70 smartphones.

"The Nokia N70 mobile device that we are using is an essential part of the game, because it's really a miniaturized computer that does everything a person needs from a PC. It has audio and video capabilities and goes even further, letting us capture the flavor of moments in photo or video format," explains Steffen P. Walz, creator of REXplorer. "The Nokia N70 device allows us to deploy a camera-based gesture-recognition system, optical-flow processing, audio processing, or Bluetooth communications between the device and the GPS receiver. All of this is done by software development; no hardware changes were needed."

Using the Nokia N70 devices and the GPS receivers, players can take pictures of the places they visit during the game and then upload geotagged images to blogs. These pictures are placed on a digital map that shows the route taken by the players and the points of interest they visited. The blogs can be shared online and serve as rewards, lasting diaries, and springboards for further investigation of the city's history.

REXplorer is a joint project of the ETH Zurich's chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) and the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, for the REX Erlebnismuseum Regensburg Experience and Regensburg tourist information. The game — which both steers and enriches the mobile experience — serves research groups as a continuous project focusing on pervasive and mobile game design, place-making, urban computing/interactive architecture, and influencing.

LocoMash – geotag your photos

No more blogs full of disorganized pictures of your holidays or business trips. With LocoMash, you can represent your journeys through geotagged photo mashups.

LocoMash, developed by Mobile Radicals under the supervision of Dr. Paul Coulton and Dr. Reuben Edwards of UK's Lancaster University, is a novel mobile social-software system that enables users to represent events as geotagged photo mashups. It is also a mobile mass-observation system that enables groups of individuals equipped with mobile camera phones and GPS to create real-time spatial and temporal photographic mashups around particular events or places.

LocoMash users can define their own contextual tags at the time of blogging, in order to allow more context-based searching. The time/space blogs can be stored on the phones until the users decide to upload them to the Web.

"LocoMash gives people an interesting way of recording events or journeys," says Dr. Paul Coulton, researcher at Lancaster University. "Users just have to open the LocoMash application installed on a compatible S60 mobile device and take a picture using the internal camera of the device. The photo is then geotagged and can be uploaded to an online blog and be shared with family and friends."

From left: Dr. Reuben Edwards and
Dr. Paul Coulton were presenting
LocoMash at Nokia Games Summit 2007.

In this project, the developers sought to create novel tools and systems based on mobile phones, to enable people to record their everday lives and events in a richer way than ever before. They created zones that are downloaded at the start of a mashup and displayed as part of the user information. On the LocoMash web site, these zones can be used to filter the images spatially.

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