Pervasive Games: Bringing Computer Entertainment Back to the Real World

Pervasive Games: Bringing Computer Entertainment Back to the Real World gives an introduction to the world of pervasive games. The scope is larger than my Pervasive Game Development Today in which I focused more on location-aware games. On the other hand, it is less technical. The authors categorized the types of pervasive games and give examples for each genre. Categories are Smart Toys, Affective Gaming, Augmented Tabletop Games, Location-Aware Games, and Agumented Reality Games

Telecommuting Era Still Facing Social Barries

“Work is where you hang your coat Sun leads way in telework — working not just from home but anywhere” talks about “telecommuting”, the next generation of “telework” because nowadays we are not not just working from home but working from anywhere. In a few words, the technological barries for telecommuting now in the verge of being broken, telecommuting is still facing social barries. Managers worry that unsupervised employees might goof off. Workers worry that losing face time might hurt their chances for advancement. However, telecommuting cuts the costs for the employer and improves the productivity of some types of employees. “All of us who participated can attest to the fact that you end up working more because of sitting there without day-to-day interruptions”. Telecommuting is still based on very informal rules, as a lot of telecommuting arrangements are initially done under the table and many companies have no program to manage their guerrilla distributed workers.

Cell Phone Tower Search

Happy americans that can get access to good map resolutions and the FCC registration information on cell towers. The mix of the two gives Cell Phone Tower Search. A searchable, interactive map to visualize cell towers (116,864 antennas last updated on July 29, 2005) in the US using Google Maps.

HotorNot + Google Maps

Find people to meet on HotOrNot.com by browsing on a Google Map. Valuable mashup of Hot or Not profiles and Google maps for stalkers.

Stamps Taking Shape

Stamps is taking shape. GSM tracking, post/reply to messages, place/view landmarks, view other users and self positioning are implemented. Maps are getting more precise and less memory hungry. Full featured prototype is due by the end of this months.

Flate Rate GPRS

Sunrise Switzerland annonced a flate rate GRPS offer (9 CHF, for 4 months with monthly data transfer limit of 100MB/month). It pushed me to finally setup my PowerBook to get Internet access via Bluetooth using my Nokia and GPRS. Ross Barkman’s GPRS Info Page provides all the infos with a link to his Apple GPRS scripts. Good feeling of cheap ubiquity…

Système de Gestion de Flotte

LogiFleet, une entreprise de la région de Lausanne met à disposition un systèmes de gestion de flotte (C-Track). Le géo-positionnement se fait par GPS et la transmission de données par SMS et GPRS. Ils annoncent que 4500 entreprises exploitent C-Track pour gérer 100’000 véhicules. Une applications est, par exemple, “suivi de la température de véhicules frigorifiques”.

Suivi d’un véhicule à Genève

Microsoft Steps in the WiFi Positioning Market

There is always a good news and a bad news having a a giant entering a niche market. The field will get more attention and finance, but the air is expected to grow really thick.

Microsoft tracks WiFi for new mapping system

In a new initiative, Microsoft has dispatched cars to trawl many city and suburban streets across the U.S. to locate the signals sent out by millions of short-range home and office wireless (or WiFi) networks. The unusual move, now being repeated in the U.K. and some other countries, is part of a plan to create a ground-based location system as an alternative to the GPS satellite system.

In the same time I stumbled accross “Skyhook lands customer for its wi-fi location service” that mentions that Skyhook Wireless signed its first customer for its wi-fi location service. A Tennessee-based company that provides data security, tracking and recovery services for PCs and laptops, will use Skyhook’s WiFi positioning technology to help track and recover stolen laptops for commercial and individual clients.

Skyhook needs users to survive, because they are the ones updating the AP database.

Wochenende in Zürich

Hell’s door, threatening sky, sad trolley, Bloomberg has encountered a problem and needs to close.

Vis-a-Vis: Mobile and Pervasive Electronic Gaming

Afte WiFi Bedouin and other mobile, location-based games, one of Julian Bleecker current project along with Peter Brinson is called Vis-a-Vis. They’ve cobbled together a mobile gaming framework composed of light-weight, outdoor viewable TabletPCs, the Torque available source game engine, a GPS, a mil-spec 3D sensor that’s able to measure where one points the TabletPC. The plan with Vis-a-Vis Games is to take ordinary electronic gaming off the old fashioned video game console and desktop PC and moves it out into the real world.

On of their current demo, is an implementation of the Red Light, Green Light game.