Eerie Enhanced Reality Interactive Experience
One of the main goals with Playground is to achieve a technical infrastructure for creating interactive physical environments. The EERIE activity within Playground will create one such environment for live role-playing games.
Role-playing is not only used for entertainment purposes but has become an often used tool for education, such as management courses or team building, where the participants take on different roles and are presented to different situations that they have to solve or overcome. The goal is to learn how to deal with these situations and get an understanding of the different roles. Though within EERIE our initial aim is to create an experience for entertainment.
Role-playing was one of the first leisure related use of the Internet in its early days, and has since then grown. Today the largest online applications are different variation on the role-playing game theme. Within EERIE, we want to move these activities into a new dimension bring it out of the virtual world and merge it with the real world. This mix can also be seen as a way of doing real interactive movies: someone has created a story line that you as a player, together with others, is going to experience and explore. EERIE will use earlier experiences from Playground and Kidstory, such as creation and authoring of physical rooms and narratives, along with several technical results from these projects.
EERIE is not a live role-playing game on its own; it is a framework and a set of general tools for constructing electronic landscapes suitable for role-play or role-play-like events.
EERIE starts from a number of geographical locations such as a building with several rooms, or a neighborhood with its streets, blocks and parks. Added to that is a parallel world, a world under the surface of reality. For the participants, a familiar city scape, through support from projections, sound effects and hidden instructions, transforms into a medieval forest or a radioactive wasteland. A dull office becomes a haunted house, a submarine or a space station. With assistance from different kinds of information, the players experience the parallel world that they will explore. Sometimes more direct guidance might be necessary and can be given by more detailed instructions. The system as such can be run either with or without direct intervention from game masters. A game master is someone who knows the plot and may direct or assist players in their experience.
To be able at every moment to deliver individual information as a sonic and visual experience, the system needs the ability to identify an individual participant and his or her position. This feature also offers good support for splitting players into different groups or teams. The parallel virtual world superimposed onto the real world is an entity and participants can choose to only exist in it, thus making remote participation possible.
The core technology in EERIE could be drawn from the following short scenario:
One player walks into a room towards a wall, and is identified by the system node when he is within a few meters of the wall. The system sends a short audio clip to his headphones - he hears footsteps from behind walking just towards him, the footsteps continue shortly passed him and suddenly a soft voice says "Please help me, save me, I need protection. Hold up your toolbox". Confused, the player holds up the device he has been told is his toolbox. A wining sound is heard and the soft voice says once more "Thanks! I'm now safely in your toolbox?" The player looks down on the screen on the device called the toolbox and sees a small creature there. After leaving the room he meets another player whom earlier claimed to be a biologist. He stops her and asks if she has seen any strange creatures, but she has not. He shows the creature he found. She comments, let me take it into my box, I might be able to talk to it. He beams over the creature into her box.
These events indicates a few needed base technologies:
- short range identification of players
- transmission of sound/images from system to players
- short range data transmission between players
A first implementation of this technology would use PDAs with built in infrared hardware support for the player-to-system identification and also the communication between players. Because of the advantage when doing quick prototyping, and past experience, the 3Com Palm PDA is used.
The reason for using IR is to be able to control the range of transmission (information can be received on one side of a wall but not the other). However, because of the line-of-sight drawback, we would aim to use a much smaller device with ultrasound transmission in a future implementation.
The "interaction nodes" will to begin with be using laptops/PDAs with IR support. For transmission of sound from a system node to a participant, we will utilize off-the-shelf IR connected headphones. This will yield a cheap short-range one-to-many transmission.
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