Thursday, February 9, 2012

Opportunistic Communication for Multiplayer Mobile Gaming: Lessons Learned from PhotoShoot


   In this paper the authors describe their prototype for mobile “opportunistic communication” called Ibis. Ibis is a middleware that attempts to generate ad-hoc communication between phones without the need for a centralized server. The authors enumerate the faults of the current use of centralized servers for mobile gaming, stating that there are a variety of other means that are simply not utilized. Ibis attempts to make use of all those available. The software attempts to bind to any available network, and allows for communication between arbitrary numbers of send and receive ports. Ibis is evidently lightweight, so we can surmise that the power consumption is low on the hosting phone, though no comment is made to this effect. There are few implementation details discussed aside from the fact that most everything is performed ad-hoc.
   Also covered in the paper is a small game designed to use the Ibis system. The authors call it PhotoShoot. It is a two-player dueling game wherein the users attempt to snap a photo of the other’s face, after pacing off from eachother, within a certain timeframe using a limited number of shots. The face recognition component of the game was limited to the area of the augmented reality reticle located in the center of a user’s screen. This was done in order to cut back on computationally expensive face recognition. User studies showed that the game performed well, though further development to Ibis  must be done to allow it to handle inadvertent disconnects. On a side note, Ibis was originally developed for High Performance Distributed Computing.

Roelof Kemp, Nicholas Palmer, Thilo Kielmann, and Henri Bal. 2010. Opportunistic communication for multiplayer mobile gaming: lessons learned from PhotoShoot. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networking (MobiOpp '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 182-184. DOI=10.1145/1755743.1755780 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1755743.1755780

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