Mobile spell-casting in Regensburg

What about visiting the beautiful town of Regensburg and unraveling it’s historical background by casting spells? REXplorer seems to be a great instantiation of a ubiquitous/pervasive gaming project, made available to tourists as an alternate (and engaging) way to experience their visit.

“the player’s goal [is] to become the day’s most successful assistant (and thus, the most notable mage) by gesturing proper location-based spells with a rental smartphone”

Traffic Signs as Game Elements

I am increasingly interested in how we can create Ubiquitous Gaming activities from existing structures and urban elements – as opposed to having to deploy specific objects and technological frameworks to support such activities.

Here is a nice example, I think. I am still trying to get my hands on the respective paper. Instead of the (now more typical) approach of using special fiduciary markers (like the sem@code tags used in ConQwest) these guys opted for feature recognition of traffic signs. Captured images of signs act as resources (water and nutrients) for growing AR plants inside a book.

I wonder how the system tells two pictures from the same sign from one another, or if instead it limits the amount of resources you collect everyday…