SoundPark: Towards Highly Collaborative Game Support in a Ubiquitous Computing Architecture

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing architectures enable interaction and collaboration in multiuser applications. We explore the challenges of integrating the disparate services required in such architectures and describe how we have met these challenges in the context of a real-world application that operates on heterogeneous hardware and run-time environments. As a compelling example, we consider the role of ubiquitous computing to support the needs of a distributed multiuser game, including mobility, mutual awareness, and geo-localization. The game presented here, "SoundPark", is played in a mixed-reality environment, in which the physical space is augmented with computer-generated audio and graphical content, and the players communicate frequently over a low-latency audio channel. Our experience designing and developing the game motivates significant discussion related to issues of general relevance to ubiquitous game architectures, including integration of heterogeneous components, monitoring, remote control and scalability.

Design Recommendations for a Collaborative Game of Bird Call Recognition Based on Internet of Sound Practices

“…In [34] a positive connection was shown between challenging mechanics requiring the performance of gestures with the satisfaction gained from the experience. In [35] the behavior of the virtual sound sources that players need to locate is controlled by the movement of other antagonizing players, whereas in [36] players take up different roles and need to coordinate their actions in the augmented space to achieve the game goal. Sound recognition and audio based analytics [37,38] can further expand the possibilities for interaction by advancing the responsiveness between the natural and the virtual acoustic environment [39], whereas user experience improvement techniques from the wider frame of AR can be utilized to enhance the system's context-awareness [40].…”

Building a pervasive social gaming experience using SocialPG

“…Some other examples of geolocated games that use the technological advances provided by pervasive computing are, CATS (Magerkurth, 2004), Team Exploration (Gentes, 2010), FinN (Akribopoulos, 2009), Why Is Everyone Inside Me?! (Sanneblad, 2004), Geolympus (Arango-L opez, 2021), LAGARTO (Maia, 2017), SPLASH (Razikin, 2011) and SoundPark (Pellerin, 2009).…”