Entertainment Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) expected to be widely and deeply involved in our daily life enabling various types of wireless applications (e.g. medical, sportive, or even entertainment). Sharing the same frequency band, an expected frequent situation will occurred where coexistence between a considerable numbers of WBAN causing significant performance degradation to the system. Direct Sequence Ultra WideBand (DS-UWB) mechanism is a considerable solution to that problem, but the variety of required Quality of Services (QoS) and demands for these services' customers introduce a bigger challenge. In this paper, we propose a multiple transmit and single receiving antenna (MISO) system where a special coding applied to the transmitted data which known as Space Time Spreading (STS) to mitigate the WBAN channel fading effects. To accommodation higher number of sensors in the same frequency band and grantee a reasonable performance, we combine STS with DS-UWB spreading scheme. Moreover, varying the spreading sequence length depending on the number of active sensors would provide an improvement to the proposed scheme.

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human-computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studiesand practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due t...

The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents "Them and Us", an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The "Them and Us" game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. "Them and Us" adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of "Them and Us" emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents "Them and Us", an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The "Them and Us" game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. "Them and Us" adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of "Them and Us" emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents "Them and Us", an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The "Them and Us" game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. "Them and Us" adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of "Them and Us" emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human-computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studies-and practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due to the seamless embodiment of technical practices may be easily developed as fully fledged products, be them games, applications or any kind of digital media that provide the unified service of education and entertainment. In such a case the end product (a digital system) permits the user to interact with the environment in a game-like manner, which enhances learnability and contributes to knowledge acquirement as the underlying objective. The framework, although not a rigid one but rather subjected to ad hoc adjustments, consists of welldefined stages, which include modern educational theories and state-of-the-art development environments. This paper describes in details the proposed educational framework for the edutainment scenarios and presents a recent case study that validates its effectiveness. Despite the fact that the framework is still under development in a continuous feedback process with respect to the scenarios conceived by higher education students who utilise it, the results achieved so far are rather encouraging in terms of creativity, interaction design and aesthetics, thus addressing in a satisfactory manner the above mentioned deficiencies which -in our opinion-characterise a large portion of commercial edutainment scenarios

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studies- and practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due to the seamless embodiment of technical practices may be easily developed as fully fledged products, be them games, applications or any kind of digital media that provide the unified service of education and entertainment. In such a case the end product (a digital system) permits the user to interact with the environment in a game-like manner, which enhances learnability and contributes to knowledge acquirement as the underlying objective. The framework, although not a rigid one but rather subjected to ad hoc adjustments, consists of welldefined stages, which include modern educational theories and state of-the-art development environments. This paper describes in details the proposed educational framework for the edutainment scenarios and presents a recent case study that validates its effectiveness. Despite the fact that the framework is still under development in a continuous feedback process with respect to the scenarios conceived by higher education students who utilise it, the results achieved so far are rather encouraging in terms of creativity, interaction design and aesthetics, thus addressing in a satisfactory manner the above mentioned deficiencies which –in our opinion- characterise a large portion of commercial edutainment scenarios.

""The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents “Them and Us”, an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The “Them and Us” game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. “Them and Us” adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of “Them and Us” emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

Keywords
Location/tracking technology, entertainment applications, computer-augmented environments, pervasive gaming.""