Can you see me now?

We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant: connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it, and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS.

[1]  Wayne Piekarski,et al.  ARQuake: the outdoor augmented reality gaming system , 2002, CACM.

[2]  Andy Crabtree,et al.  Design in the absence of practice: breaching experiments , 2004, DIS '04.

[3]  A. Schutz.  The Structures of the Life World , 1973 .

[4]  Ben J. C. Clayton,et al.  Rapid Authoring of Mediascapes , 2004, UbiComp.

[5]  Anind K. Dey,et al.  Designer Support for Context Monitoring and Control , 2003 .

[6]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  Revealing delay in collaborative environments , 2004, CHI.

[7]  Bernt Schiele,et al.  Evaluating the Effects of Displaying Uncertainty in Context-Aware Applications , 2004, UbiComp.

[8]  Austin Henderson,et al.  Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers , 2002, CHI.

[9]  Hideyuki Tamura,et al.  Case studies of see-through augmentation in mixed reality project , 1999 .

[10]  Steve Benford,et al.  Orchestrating a mixed reality performance , 2001, CHI.

[11]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Distributed mediation of ambiguous context in aware environments , 2002, UIST '02.

[12]  Martin Flintham.  Painting the town red: configuring location-based games by colouring maps , 2005, ACE '05.

[13]  Bruce H. Thomas,et al.  Arquake: the outdoors augmented reality system , 2002 .

[14]  Steve Benford,et al.  Coping with Uncertainty in a Location-Based Game , 2003, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[15]  Steve Benford,et al.  Where on-line meets on the streets: experiences with mobile mixed reality games , 2003, CHI '03.

[16]  Matthew Chalmers,et al.  Seamful interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems , 2004, DIS '04.

[17]  Bastian Leibe,et al.  MIND-WARPING: towards creating a compelling collaborative augmented reality game , 2000, IUI '00.

[18]  Steve Benford,et al.  Collaboratively improvising magic: An approach to managing participation in an on-line drama , 2001, ECSCW.

[19]  Mel Siegel,et al.  Sensor fusion for context understanding , 2002, IMTC/2002. Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (IEEE Cat. No.00CH37276).

[20]  Keith Cheverst,et al.  Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences , 2000, CHI.

[21]  Steve Benford,et al.  Ambiguity as a resource for design , 2003, CHI '03.

[22]  Staffan Björk,et al.  Pirates! Using the Physical World as a Game Board , 2001, INTERACT.

[23]  Christian Heath,et al.  Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms , 1991, ECSCW.

[24]  Duncan Rowland,et al.  "Savannah”: designing a location-based game simulating lion behaviour , 2004 .

[25]  Duncan Rowland,et al.  The Error of Our Ways: The Experience of Self-Reported Position in a Location-Based Game , 2004, UbiComp.

[26]  Oskar Juhlin,et al.  Decentralizing the control room: Mobile work and institutional order , 2001, ECSCW.

[27]  Ian Alexander.  Review of Designing collaborative systems. A practical guide to ethnography by A. Crabtree, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2003 , 2003 .

[28]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Interaction techniques for ambiguity resolution in recognition-based interfaces , 2007, SIGGRAPH '07.

[29]  Ian Alexander.  Designing Collaborative Systems. A Practical Guide to Ethnography , 2003, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[30]  Kristina Höök,et al.  Social Navigation and Seamful Design (特集 ソーシャルナビゲーション) , 2004 .

[31]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research , 1999, CoBuild.

[32]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  Particle Filters for Location Estimation in Ubiquitous Computing: A Case Study , 2004, UbiComp.

[33]  Steve Benford,et al.  Orchestrating a mixed reality game 'on the ground' , 2004, CHI.