Moing

augmented mobile game demo
developed in Kitchen Budapest
collaborators: Simon Forgacs, Andras Sly Szalai
Budapest, Hungary
2008

A game that is played in an urban space. There are virtually existing points in the city that the players have to find or evade with the help of their mobile phones. A central website keeps record of what objects are positioned on each point of the map, while the mobile clients send information of their actual positions to the server from time to time. The final goal of the game can be to reach a given score which could be exchanged to valueable prizes.

Technical description
The system consists of a website running on a central server and mobile clients that communicate with the server. The mobile devices need to have GPS moduls or other positioning tools within a 10 meters limit of accuracy. The type of the software running on the mobil devices is now JAVA-based and if further developed then it would most probably be applications for the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other popular smartphones. It is also possible to implement it for the most recent mobile web browsers that can access GPS information and so then the users don’t even need to download any applications.

The flow of the game
The players receive a message if a given object – let it be good or bad – gets closer than 15 m to them. In case it was points to pick up, the server adds it to the player’s score but in case it was a bomb the website responds that the bomb exploded which can lead to the loss of some points (that can be gathered by other players) or even to the player’s death (restart with 0 points).