Augmented Reality for hand-held location-based gaming

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Master Project No Affiliation

Assignment

The master project consists of the development of a framework for Augmented Reality location-based gaming. A location-based game is a type of pervasive game in which the gameplay evolves and progresses via a player’s location. Thus, location-based games must provide some mechanism to allow the player to report their location. On mobile devices, this is through some kind of localization technology, for example by using satellite positioning through GPS. “Urban gaming” or “street games” are typically multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.

The framework to be developed should allow for usage of mapping data from the OpenStreetMap project.

Setup

The creation of the framework consists of multiple tasks:

• A server component that contains map data from the OpenStreetMap project and sends objects such as roads, buildings, and other points of interest (POI) to the clients.
• A client application that requests map data from the server according to its latest GPS position for rendering and user interaction.

Server

The server component is responsible for distributing OpenStreetMap elements (nodes, ways, relations) to the connected mobile devices as well as for basic multi-player account management. This includes reading of map files in OSM file formats and organizing the data in a way that makes it possible to answer location-based queries - e.g. sending all elements in vircinity of a given longitude/latitude to a client - in real-time.

Rendering

The rendering component of the mobile client sends location-based queries to the server component and displays the received objects as a map. In addition to roads and building contour geometry, map features, e.g. POIs such as historic sites, should be displayed relative to the current position of the device.

Interaction

Users of the system should be able to interact with each other and with the environment. Basic interactions such as sending of text messages between the users that are currently online should be supported. An example interaction with the environment would be the on-demand displaying of additional map features on user request. The placement of additional POI information should be optimized to maximise readability.

Requirements

• Interactive Computer Graphics
• Realtime Interactive Systems
• (Preferably) Android knowledge for the development of the client

Contact

Dr.-Ing. Florian Niebling | Phone: +49 931 31 88343 | E-mail: florian.niebling@uni-wuerzburg.de

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg