HQ interface preview
GPS development
Creating an edutaining game experience required a few disciplines of development and design that all have to come together. Historical facts had to be interpreted and transformed into the game and educational concept. These then had to match the learning goals of the education system while still providing an engaging story and gaming elements. Digital content had to be created. The game concept and underlying soft- and hardware technology had to be integrated through software development. At the user end the whole concept and the media content had to be made accessible through two collabarative screen-based interfaces: the HQ laptop and the mobile gaming phone.
The student teams are equipped with the latest mobile phones packed with photo- and videocameras. The gamephone is programmed with a dedicated game application running in the telephone's Java environment. It has a permanent internet connection to a server at Waag Society's lab. For exchanging gamedata and multimedia, the mobile learning game is using GPRS and UMTS connections.
The game phone is hooked up to a receiver that permanently monitors the team's position using the Global Positioning System. It uses a short-range wireless Bluetooth connection to send its data to the game phone, which in turn sends it to the server. At the server, locations of teams and objects are combined and mapped onto medieval Amsterdam via a special translation process. This clip shows how a one-day speed-up of GPS game coordinates are turned and twisted to get remapped onto a mirrored sixteenth century map by Anthoniszoon. distorted and The game phones receive the processed game data and display the position and status of the team.
To allow all players to join the same virtual space in which they are moving about while up- and downloading media, a game engine was created that uses Waag Society's Keyworx platform. Programmers can download it or check out technical documentation on this open-source platform.
We also have images online from our default technology presentation. These will give you an overview of the hardware setup and the software protocols designed for the game.