Hitchers

Hitchers was a prototype game for mobile phones that exploited cellular positioning on mobile phones to support location-based play. It served as an early technology demonstrator within IPerG, showing an alternative approach to determining location and evaluating this through a preliminary study. In Hitchers, players created digital hitch-hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then dropped them into their current phone cell. Other players then searched their current cell for hitchers, picked them up, answered their questions, carried them to new locations and dropped them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers passed from player to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months showed how the seams in cellular positioning, including varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience and was published at Ubicomp 2006.

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Hitchers