WE ARE CURRENTLY MAKING CHANGES TO THE M3DCAM WEBSITE, IN THE MEANTIME KEEP UPLOADING YOUR 3D PHOTOS AND WE WILL BRING BACK THE PHOTO INTERFACE

Mystic Paul sporting a natty pair of Lava Girl glasses

m3Dcam is an application that allows you to use your mobile phone camera to create 3-D anaglyph images.The 3D images can then be either viewed on phone screen (using suitable pair of 3D glasses) or saved to a community website .

Mobile SprayCan (www.mobspray.com)

Since the first appearance of modern man one trait of human behaviour in our interaction with the physical environment appears to be an inherent desire to leave our mark on a particular object or space. ‘SprayCan’ graffiti that appeared in the 1970s is but a modern extension of this phenomenon, yet it divides communities and generations in terms of how it should be dealt with in terms of either complete acceptance or punitive action. In this project we have developed a system that tries to bridge the divide as it both provides writers with a means of tagging their environment, using mobile phones and RFID tags, whilst minimising the physical effects to the landscape for the communities where it resides. Mobile SprayCan Project

Mobile Spray can site marker

TxT Books (www.thetxtbk.com)

Screenshot from www.thetxtbk.com homepage.

TxT Book is an open, collaborative storybook based upon the technique of ‘Exquisite Corpse’ which was developed by surrealists in the 1920’s for creating accidental poetry. Users may only submit a maximum of 160 characters (standard SMS length) to the book at a time and they may only view the previous person’s entry when considering their own. In order to ensure some kind of (shallow) cohesiveness, when a user is submitting their entry, the database is locked-down to ensure that the entries follow on from each other (in a chain). Once a user has entered his/her story (or their allotted timeslot has expired), the database is unlocked to allow others to participate.

Users can submit entries to TxT Book via two different methods – from their PC or from their mobile phone. By allowing different methods of input, TxT Book seeks to compare the popularity of the two.

TxT Book will attempt to examine the spread of information in way which is not intrusive (this is not viral marketing!), free and, hopefully, quite fun. We will initially seed TxT Book by sending out an SMS to friends containing a link to the WAP submission page. Once a user submits an entry to TxT Book, they are then asked if they would like to forward the original SMS to a friend who might be interested in contributing.

On visiting the TxT Book’s homepage, users are automatically served content based upon the capability of their browser (WAP enabled browsers receive dynamically generated WML files, whilst PC users are delivered XHTML content). Users may also subscribe to an RSS feed of the story which contains the latest submissions.

TxT Book Website

A modified version of the thetxbk was created for the Spoken Word tent at Roskilde Rock Festival July 2007.

Roskilde TxT Book 2007

PAC-LAN is a novel version of the video game PACMAN in which human players play the game on a maze based on Alexandra Park at Lancaster University campus. To play the game the PAC-LAN player collects pills using the mobile which are in the form of colored plastic discs containing RFID tags placed around the maze. Four other players take the role of the ghosts who attempt to hunt down the PAC-LAN. A Java application, running on a mobile phone connects PAC-LAN and the Ghosts to a central game server using GPRS.The server relays to PAC-LAN his current position and that of the ghosts based on the pills he has collected. The pills can also be used by the ghosts, not to gain points, but to obtain PAC-LAN’s last known position which will only be updated when they interact with another pill. The ghosts ‘kill’ PAC-LAN by detecting him via RFID on his clothing (or costume). Similarly when PAC-LAN collects a power pill he is then able to kill the ghosts using the same RFID detection process. Dead ghosts must then return to the central point to be reactivated into the game. Points are allocated on pills collected and ghosts killed. The central point is controlled by the server and a special RFID point to ensure ghosts remain immobile until released. PAC-LAN The Game Site.

Big Game Huntr

Big Game Huntr; a mobile location based game which encourages emergent behaviour by allowing the general public to design their own games around any subject to be played in a place of their own choosing.

Free Londons Monsters

This is an interesting take on a location based game which incorporates user generated content in the form of sketches of monsters. It’s in collaboration between the Mobile Radicals and artist Andrew Wilson who originally ran a workshop at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where people could sketch there idea of what the London’s monsters might look like. The Mobile Radicals have turned the sketches into a mobile location based game called Free London’s Monsters to be played around the actual locations where the monsters were envisaged. Here is the first prototype which uses the phone camera as the Magic Monstervision Machine (that’s an S60 phone to the uninitiated) to capture monsters when the players enter their lair.

MobHunt

The inspiration for Treasure hunt games arguably started with the early stages of the development of archaeology as this arguably included a significant aspect of treasure hunts and they certainly served to capture public imagination. Treasure Hunt games are either a single player or a group of players trying to find hidden articles, locations or places by using a series of clues. In the earliest versions of these games the clues consisted of pieces of paper secreted at specific location. A modern variant of this is Geocaching which is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. In our version of treasure hunt for mobile phones, known as MobHunt,clues are placed on RFID tags which can be read by a suitably equipped mobile phone and information can be changed or added in real-time using the data network.

They Howl (Coming Soon)

This is a location based game written in J2ME and utilises GPS to obtain positional information. The GPS unit is not an integrated part of the phone but rather we exploit the proliferation of GPS units that can be accessed via Bluetooth is cheaper and more readily available than integrated solutions.

The premise for the game itself builds on our experiences from PAC-LAN where sounds were perceived to be the best form of feedback. The sounds in this case are the howls of a wolf pack who are hunting down their prey in a mixed reality landscape. The howls from the wolves enable them to co-ordinate their efforts when following the virtual ‘scent’ trail left by the prey as the flee from the approaching pack.

The prey leaves a trail of virtual scent markers which are automatically generated every two minutes by the application. The wolves can detect a marker by coming within 25 metres of the scent marker. Once a wolf has found a scent marker they howl to the rest of the pack. They howl causes the display on the other wolves’ phones to indicate the direction they must travel to reach that scent marker which appears at the centre of the screen. The wolves must then work together to find the next marker and ultimately track down the prey. The prey also gets an update to his display showing the position of the pack. The prey is caught if two or more wolves come within 25 metres of the prey, having collected all the scent markers, at which point they all let out a group howl indicating their presence while the prey emits a death gurgle. The prey gains points for the length of time within the game and the distance travelled. Wolves gain points for both finding the scent markers and capturing the prey.

Whereas PAC-LAN required a pre formed group to be present at a specific location They Howl is designed for more spontaneous game play that using location although is not tied to a specific location. To facilitate this we have create a lobby system which will allow potential players to gather in any location to play the game. The game area is normally limited to 1 Km square and potential players can be anywhere within that square. Once there are a least three players the game can begin or they can wait for others to join up to a maximum of 10. The game server random selects a player to act as prey whilst the remaining players become wolves.