[near] futures of digital
entertainment in mobile
situations
nicolas nova
EPFL - LIFTlabs - Phoenix Interactive
Lyon - 18 juillet 2007
Picture taken in Tokushima, Japan (december 2005), kids gathered playing a mobile phone game
altogether in a temple

current situation (1)
Mobile gaming = immobile gaming

current situation (1)

output
input
current situation (2)
The Zoolander phone... shows the limits of the interface

researchers do research
(academia, start-ups, industries)

(Picture: Blast Theory)
location-based games
lots of prototypes, few products (Mogi in Japan)... often one-shot/events
mostly based on tracking people or multi-user treasure hunt

accelerometers and gestural interfaces
In this case, the point is to use the mobile only as the input, the output is a tv-screen.
Tilt racer (University of Lancaster)
http://www.mobileradicals.com/index.php/Mobile_3-D_Motion_Games
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqYVJ0zpDx8
Very like the Nintendo-wiimote

augmented reality and mobile tagging
Lots of projects here... see Nokia MARA (left) and lots of visual markers (right)... aim at linking
specific information to physical places. Both for social/web2.0 applications and playful games.

but... today...
yes there’s a “but”, things are not running smoothly... these applications are mostly prototypes, not
yet to be seen on a mass market deployment
let’s see 2 reasons

1) market fragmentation
1) lots of dierent hardware
2) very few people have high end phones (smartphones), less than 5% of the people who have a cell
phone
3) lots of dierent software
Market is fragmented AND very small

2) infrastructures can break = difficult to have a
continuous experience
More about this: Dourish, P. & Bell, G. (2007). The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience
of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Environment and
Planning B,

so what?
few hints

phone = microphone: “Away from the new”
Once again in mobile gaming, one forget the importance of a cell phone characteristic: it convey
audio communication. Designing audio interaction can take various form: for example you can
detect when a person is blowing. An example of such is the game “Away from the new” (http://
art.berkeley.edu/niemeyer/art.html). Unfortunately the picture is only a friend faking it

phone = communication tool: ARG
Phone can be used for Alternate Reality Game, to support live action role palying games (Read:
http://igda.org/arg/whitepaper.html) The example here is Live Action Scotland Yard: “One guy named
Mr. X runs around Toronto’s transit system in a bright yellow shirt, while three or more guys in red shirts try to find him using
the clues he gives at every third stop he makes. The three detectives are coordinated by dispatchers who tell the detectives
where they think Mr. X might be and how best to block him off. Mr. X’s dispatcher is relaying information about the detectives
whereabouts and tries to keep him away from them. The game ends when a turn limit has been reached or X is caught.
Scotland Yard is played by 6 or more people, half of the players are in the field, and the other half are dispatchers. Teams are
paired up, one dispatcher with a field agent. Each pair is in contact with each other using a cell phone. One agent in the field is
chosen to be “Mr. X” while the rest are detectives.”

continuity of experience: mobile/console (Power Pro)
Power Pro (konami): train your base-ball player as your team on your mobile phone, use them on
the PS2 (form mobile version to PS2 using codes)

complementarity of experience): “Idols”
Idola (a finnish TV show) is an interesting example described by Tomi H. Ahonen in his book
“Communities Dominates Brands”: it engages tv-viewers in a TV-related service to mobile: a
\"mobile karaoke\". viewers call a number, sing their song to the karaoke service, listen to it, to make
sure its the best they could do. then it's saved and the contest begin. People vote. 1,862 persons
sang songs into this contest. 150,000 Finns went in and voted on the songs. they generated a total
of 1.95 million votes. And it achieved more voting trafic than the actual TV show did

complementarity of experience (2): “Waterwar”
A multiplayer SMS-TV game: SMS to TV: “Send a premium text message to interact with other
players. The gameplay is displayed on your home TV, transmitted over local television”.
By Frantic Media (Finland), broadcasted on MTV3 & SubTV (Finland)

use basic sensers (pedometers versus GPS)
Lots of innovation with basic sensors: Teku Teku Angle or V-Migo: raise a virtual character nurtured
with physical movement tracked by a pedometers (also think of distance computed out of cell
phone antenas)

conclusions
• innovation is not necessarily technology-
oriented (near future perspective)
• thinks about phone fundamentals (voice)
• continuity of experience
• complementarity of experience
• basic technologies allow intriguing things

2000 2007 2015
CYSMN
Uncle Roy
Location-Based Botfighters Mogi
Gaming Location-
based games
Nokia AR games
ARgaming Nokia MARA
(Agent V,...)
Augmented
reality gaming
Tilt
Accelerometers Gestural
interfaces
Multiplayer/Social Mini Friday
Basic UI Audio/Blowing games
MMO Mobile Tagging
ARG
Consumer
Market TV-phone tie-
SMS/TV Idols Water war
in
Broadcast
TV
Mobile Entertainment
Cone of Uncertainty
A foresight tool (cone of uncertainty) that aims at mapping the possibilities. The horizontal line
shows the consumer market. When circles/things are close to the edges, it means that it’s not
certain to be around before few years? The problem is to find what can turned them into more
market-orientated products.
For example, a way to bring location-based games closer to the market would be to forget the use
of GPS but to let people self-disclose their locations.

merci
nicolas.nova@epfl.ch