TOTEM

Mixed Reality combines the real world with a virtual scene and creates an immersive and interactive real-time environment. The possible applications are almost limitless and encompass areas like learning, architecture or industrial production.

In the gaming area, Mixed Reality offers unique opportunities. Unlike with traditional video games, these games are not imprisoned onto the screen but interact with the real world. They incorporate real locations and objects into the game, therefore tapping into already existing thoughts and emotions of the player, which in turn creates a potentially much richer gaming world and experience. Mobile Mixed Reality Gaming even goes a step further as the playing area becomes borderless and games can be played literally anywhere and anytime. With the current advancement of modern cell phone technology, we are identifying the potential of Mobile Mixed Reality Games being played by anyone.

The objective of the TOTEM project is to develop a complete framework for enabling easy creation of mobile mixed reality games that generate pervasive gaming experiences for the players. In order to achieve this we plan to:

• Create easy-to use yet powerful authoring tools for the creation and modification of Mobile Mixed Reality Games (MMRGs) and gaming content both for non-expert as well as for expert users.
• Offer a platform where interested players, game designers and game developers can communicate with each other, share knowledge, games and gaming content thus creating a lively community for MMRGs.
• Define a description language supported by a scripting interface suitable for completely defining a diverse range of MMRGs including tracking data, game artefacts and interaction methods.
• Develop the tools and infrastructure necessary for the deployment and playing of MMRGs consisting of a MMRGs client software for today’s and tomorrow’s mobile devices, a game server, a multimedia database and a system for managing context data in ubiquitous environments.
• Stage a considerable amount of MMRGs in order to increase knowledge about game design and presence related research questions and to feed back results into the technical parts of the project.