The workshop was held on April 20, 2004 during the Pervasive 2004 conference.

Please find the participants' position papers and workshop results below..

 

Introduction

Gaming has been a hot topic and innovating force in most cultures for thousands of years. Traditionally, playing games involves social interactions or includes physical media such as game boards or soccer balls. With the advent of the personal computer, the virtual domain substituted most of the physical and social aspects of traditional games and introduced the highly successful class of computer and video games. With attractive presentations, complex simulations, and artificial intelligence, these gaming applications keep millions of people playing and hardware manufacturers steadily innovating. However, computer entertainment still lacks rich human-to-human interaction and is not grounded in our physical world.

With the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive computing technology, we are now facing a radical paradigm shift in which the computer as a medium steps back and weaves itself into the fabric of our physical and social environments. For entertainment and gaming, this holds the chance of reclaiming social and physical aspects to create new and revolutionary forms of experiences.

Motivation

While certain research areas within the pervasive computing community advance at an amazing speed (e.g. context modelling or sensor technology), the body of meaningful applications using these technologies is still rather limited. Combining pervasive computing technologies with hedonic applications many people enjoy and are used to, will have a positive effect on the dissemination of the pervasive computing paradigm and strengthen our community.

Our motivation for this workshop is to bring together researchers who are interested in interactive entertainment and the opportunities and risks that pervasive computing might introduce to it. We want to discuss initial results from this emerging field and share our experiences and visions to identify relevant research questions and future research directions.

Format of the Workshop

The workshop will be run for an entire day beginning with very brief (i.e. max. five minutes each) presentations of the participants outlining their motivation to be at the workshop. Participants are expected to have read the position papers of the other researchers in advance so that these introductions can be concise.

An idea-finding session will then be conducted to gather interesting ideas, emerging research themes, and limiting issues.  Then, three or four sub-groups will be formed to elaborate on one particular topic.

The sub-groups will work independently in the afternoon discussing important issues, problems and proposed solutions regarding their topic. Near the end of the day, all workshop participants will reunite to present their ideas for discussion.

In a concluding plenary session, all the participants will have the opportunity to both reflect on the workshop’s results and to identify issues that still remain critical or controversial with the need for future research activities.

Organizers

Carsten Magerkurth
Carsten Magerkurth is both a commercial game developer (www.emperor-studios.de) and a researcher at Fraunhofer IPSI (www.ipsi.fhg.de/ambiente) where he works on computer augmented tabletop games and more serious applications for ubiquitous computing environments.

Regan Mandryk
Regan Mandryk is a Ph.D. student researching issues related to co-located collaboration.  She has worked on entertainment applications and technologies for children and adults, and her recent work focuses on computer augmented tabletop games as well as affective gaming.

Steve Benford
Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing at The University of Nottingham where he founded the Mixed reality Laboratory (mel.nott.ac.uk). In collaboration with the artists group Blast Theory, he has developed a series of mixed reality games  that mix online participants with those on the streets, including Can You See Me Now, winner of the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art and Uncle Roy All Around You.

Johan Sanneblad
Johan Sanneblad is a researcher at the Viktoria Institute where he has created several game platforms for handheld, pervasive devices. His graphics platform GapiDraw (www.gapidraw.com) has been used in more than 100 commercial games and is available for Palms, Pocket PCs, Symbian devices, and stationary PCs. His network platform OpenTrek (www.opentrek.com) has been used for three years by students to create ad hoc, peer-to-peer networked games on handheld devices.