Can mobile gaming be improved

With the mobile gaming market so invested in the existing market the paper goes over various possible methods that can be utilized in order to improve upon the existing system. This consideration was based on the following questions. What is the user preference for mobile games? What net work structure is required? How can this structure be optimised? And does this senerio differ from the pc? The paper itself focused on the usage of a Content Addressable network (aka CAN network).

The CAN network is a network of information that is stored in a hash table. The keys for the table are mapping to the coordinates in the virtual space. This means that each key carries a part of the virtual space. This whole system was based on the Mobile Ad hoc NETworks. Finally the coordinates in the n dimensional virtual space are redirecting to the values in hash table. Based on the results the CAN netowrk can do a much better job at sending packets for game related material. (although there is a initial over head up to a 100 nodes) This was done by making a comparison to regular broadcasting methodology for multiplayer mobile gaming

Exploiting Social Interactions in Mobile systems

The paper examines how mobile systems can exploit people's social relations to make more informed decisions. This can lead to substantial performance gains and higher query hit rates. In order to do this the authors divided the classified social interactions in two different categories: friends and strangers. (people you meet often for longer periods of time vs. people you meet sporadically for short period of time) Afterwards the authors investigated in the potential of incorporating social information in mobile systems. This was done by using a DTN routing protocol that avoided forwarding to strangers which worked very well when routing between friends. The authors found that in the friend network, there was a high chance of clustering.

It was also found that  Another experiment was also conducted to see if a firewall that discriminates between friends and strangers slow down the propagation of a virus in a mobile network. (this was found to be true) It was also found that reliance on strangers are still necessary to allow mobile P2P file-sharing systems to satisfy the user's requests.

Using Mobile Phone as a Wii like controller for playing games on large public dispaly

The paper itself explores the possibility of utilizing a mobile phone device to interact with large screens when playing games by using 3D accelorometers and motion sensors. This whole aspect is mostly unexplored due to the relatively new nature of such a feature. The phone controller system itself is based on Bluetooth (connection between game client and server) for communication while using J2ME as the framework. The accelorometers collected three information: x,y,z and those data were sent out via Bluetooth for carrying out the communication.

The whole phone was tested on a large public display by various groups and when questioned on how to improve this the players said that the games should also account the changes in speed (the game only account for change in direction). The game that was tested was a racing game on a specific course where the person used his/her hand held to control the car. In conclusion this can help people see the possibility of utilizing such designed for games on mobile phones itself.

Blog post 1: Live Action Gaming over Bluetooth

This paper presents a new idea of possibly playing a live action game by using blue tooth as a frame work for in which the game would run under. The Bluetooth is mostly chosen as the preferred method by the authors due to the fact that blue tooth has high market penetration within society already. Apparently due to the short range of communications the game itself is very much dependent on ensuring that at least two of the players are within distance of each other. The name of the game proposed is called Blue danger and the objective of the game is to assassinate all the other players by using various methods such as fake weapons (plastic knife, water pistol, etc). The paper mainly focuses on describing the framework to implement a search and destroy type game by using mobile devices.

The basic frame work of the game itself works as follows. A database is used to store information about the players, games, weapons, etc. The information is stored/retrieved via server which allows people to register/join/leave the game itself. The server is accessed via wifi/lan for registration and GPRS for starting/ending the game. The game system itself is supported by GPRS and Bluetooth adhoc networks. (the game uses only Bluetooth for player interaction) The picture under will show the general outline of how the game is set up.

As far as the actual interaction goes the assassin with the phone is able to buy weapons and defensive items at the beginning of the game and when an assassin is within range of a participating Bluetooth ID the system checks to see if the person is a target and when that is so a warning is sent to the target and a delay based damage will be done to the target until the target dies. It is possible to dodge the attack by running out of the range of the assassin's Bluetooth.