TOTEM

Theories and Tools for Distributed Authoring of Mobile Mixed

The TOTEM project investigated mobile mixed reality games concerning their design and development. The advance of smartphones has made these games possible for a wide audience and due to their close coupling between digital and real world content, unique and exciting new possibilities for user interaction have arisen. However, creating these games is not an easy task as designing the content becomes complex and tedious – especially if the goal is to be as location-specific as possible. Reliable real-time communication in a mobile setting is still hard to achieve, and the effort to create a specific app is often underestimated. Therefore the TOTEM project provides tools to ease the development process of such games as well as client and server side support while running them.

TOTEM develops new innovative authoring tools, enabling users to create media-rich content for location-aware Mixed Reality games by:

Creating easy-to-use yet powerful mobile and web-based 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.

Developing the tools and infrastructure necessary for the deployment and playing of MMRGs consisting of a MMRGs client software based on MPEG4, a game server, a multimedia database and a system for managing context data in ubiquitous environments.

Supporting scripting of game logic elements for completely defining a diverse range of MMRGs including tracking data, game artifacts and interaction methods.

Staging a considerable amount of MMRGs in order to increase knowledge about game design and usability related research questions and to feed back results into the technical parts of the project.

Partners: Fraunhofer FIT