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Agree Or Perish: A Crowd Controlled
Augmented Reality Pervasive Game
Author Keywords
Pervasive Games; Crowd Controlled Game; Augmented
Reality; Mobile Games
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.1. [Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g.,
HCI)]: Multimedia Information Systems - Artificial,
augmented, and virtual realities
Summary
During the last years we have witnessed the emergence
of pervasive games. Games such as “Pervasive Clue”
and “Pacmanhattan” immerse players in experiences
that merge elements of the real world and virtual
world. In this paper we describe a case study of two
pervasive augmented reality (AR) games played by
more than one hundred people simultaneously. The
games were held in the auditorium of the University
Carlos III of Madrid within a dissemination activity open
to all kinds of public. The goal was to make the
audience feel inside and surrounded by the elements of
the game.
The games were organized as follows. The audience
was arranged in two teams, each of which controlled a
different game character in real time. The participants
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Alvaro Montero
Telmo Zarraonandia
Ignacio Aedo
Paloma Díaz
Computer Science Department
University Carlos III
Madrid, 28911, Spain
ammontes@inf.uc3m.es
tzarraon@inf.uc3m.es
aedo@ia.uc3m.es
pdp@inf.uc3m.es
used their mobile phones to vote for the next character
movement. The movement most voted per second
determined the direction the character would move in.
In order to translate the action of the game into the
real world a camera was placed in the centre of the
stage, looking at the auditorium stands. The game
engine processed the video captured and super-
imposed the graphical models of the elements of the
game onto it. Participants watched as the resultant
video was projected on a large screen placed on the
stage in from of them.
The main challenge of the experience was to give the
participants the impression that the characters moved
around them, along the auditorium’s corridors. This
made it necessary to provide a sense of perspective, so
that the characters would look smaller the further they
were, and occlusion, so that parts of them would be
kept hidden when moving behind real objects. To
achieve the proper alignment of the real and the virtual
world a model-based AR approach [Breen et al. 1996]
was used. This technique was used in favour of a
depth-based AR approach [Breen et al. 1996] due the
large length of the auditorium, more than 30 metres
from the stage to the back of the stands. A 3D model of
the auditorium was built, containing the corridors
through which the characters could move, and the walls
and stands that could occlude them.
In the first game the characters had to collect some
coins placed in different parts of the auditorium. The
team who collected more coins before the time limit
expired won the game. In the second game each of the
characters played the role of “prey” and “predator”
respectively, so that the predator had to capture the
prey before the time limit expired. Both games required
the audience to coordinate their choices about the next
movement that they wanted the character to perform.
The game logic was implemented using the GREP
platform, a game engine we developed in Unity to
facilitate the creation of 3D serious games by non-
technical users themselves. The platform provides a set
of tools and applications for supporting the design and
implementation of the game virtual scenarios and their
rules.
The design and development of pervasive games poses
additional difficulties to the already complicated task of
creating digital games. There is still a lack of toolkits
and platforms that tackle the specific problematic of
games of this type. For this experience we extended
the GREP platform functionalities to provide support to
collective interaction, and to generate model-based AR
game experiences. Our challenge now is to develop and
provide a set of authoring tools to allow non-technical
users the possibility to exploit these features. We hope
that this will contribute to increase the popularity of
this exciting new game genre.
“Superpowers”
My name is Álvaro Montero. I am a PhD student and
my main research interests areas are Augmented
reality and virtual worlds, but I am also interested in
other areas related to HCI. I love technology and
games.
Figure 1: National hero registration form of Alvaro Montero.
Inspirational Articles
Three papers/projects have inspired this work:
• The most inspirational article was “Human Pacman: a
mobile, wire-are entertainment system based on
physical, social, and ubiquitous computing” [Cheok et
al. 2004]. This paper describes an entertainment
system that allows user to play the Pacman game in
the streets, by means of AR technology.
• The paper “Interactive occlusion and collision of real
and virtual objects in augmented reality“ [Breen et al.
1996] details different techniques to increase the
realism of AR representations and implement an
effect of occlusion.
• Other source of inspiration was “Twitch Plays
Pokemon”. An experiment in which thousands of
people simultaneously control the character of the
popular game “Pokemon” [Tsukayama 2014].
Multimedia Resources
The Figure 2 depicts the view of the stage from the
auditorium stands. Figure 3 is a snapshot of the game
as it was visualized in the large screen placed in the
stage. The entire video of the experiment can be
viewed from the following URI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcEPM_ZA1X0
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the project CREAx funded by
the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
(TIN2014-56534-R)
References
David E. Breen, Ross T. Whitaker, Eric Rose, and
Mihran Tuceryan. 1996. Interactive occlusion and
automatic object placement for augmented reality. In
Computer Graphics Forum. Wiley Online Library, 11–
22.
Adrian David Cheok et al. 2004. Human Pacman: a
mobile, wide-area entertainment system based on
physical, social, and ubiquitous computing. Pers.
Ubiquitous Comput. 8, 2 (April 2004), 71–81.
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0267-x
Hayley Tsukayama. 2014. How 120,000 players
managed to play one epic game of Pokemon. Wash.
Post (February 2014).
Figure 2: View of the game from the stands.
Figure 3: Snapshot of the game projected in the large screen.
