Locative games, or location-based games, are very popular nowadays because of their unique playing experience. They are being mostly explored for large-scale spaces, such as urban areas, for multiple players using localization technologies like GPS, or for small-scale spaces, such as a table, for single players using vision-based methods by feature matching.

In this thesis, we propose middle-scale locative games which allow multiple players to play digital games by physically moving inside a middle-scale spaces, such as a classroom, to fill in the gap between the aforementioned large-scale and small-scale locative games. We present a new scalable map to enable the middle-scale locative game experience. Our map is built upon the recent development of fiducial markers, specifica...[ Read more ]

Locative games, or location-based games, are very popular nowadays because of their unique playing experience. They are being mostly explored for large-scale spaces, such as urban areas, for multiple players using localization technologies like GPS, or for small-scale spaces, such as a table, for single players using vision-based methods by feature matching.

In this thesis, we propose middle-scale locative games which allow multiple players to play digital games by physically moving inside a middle-scale spaces, such as a classroom, to fill in the gap between the aforementioned large-scale and small-scale locative games. We present a new scalable map to enable the middle-scale locative game experience. Our map is built upon the recent development of fiducial markers, specifically, random dot markers. We propose a simple solution, which is to use a grid of compound markers, to address the scalability problem. Our highly scalable approach is able to generate a middle-scale map on which multiple players can stand and position themselves via mobile cameras in real time. Our map could cover a large indoor area within a typical mobile phone’s limited runtime memory, and demonstrates higher localization accuracy over traditional map of ARToolkit markers. We show how a classic computer game can be effectively adapted to our middle-scale gaming platform.