FAARS: A platform for location-aware trans-reality games

Abstract

Users today can easily and intuitively record their real-world experiences through mobile devices, and commodity virtual worlds enable users from around the world to socialize in the context of realistic environments where they simulate real-world activities. This synergy of technological advances makes the design and implementation of trans-reality games, blending the boundaries of the real and virtual worlds, a compelling software-engineering problem. In this paper, we describe fAARS, a platform for developing and deploying trans-reality games that cut across the real and parallel virtual worlds, offering users a range of game-play modalities. We place fAARS in the context of recent related work, and we demonstrate its capabilities by discussing two different games developed on it, one with three different variants. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.