An investigation of user responses to specifically designed activities in a multimodal location based game

Location-based games offer opportunities for us to learn more about what different types of interactions are appropriate in certain settings. In our study we designed several different types of activity (i.e. from standard key presses, to very physical lunges, to speech cues) that required the players to use different modalities in certain locations. Since the players could play the game whenever they wanted over the course of several days and the game space covered a wide area, i.e. the whole of the university campus, we needed a way to capture any of the activities, emotions and interactions whether these were the ones expected or not. The objective of this paper therefore was to investigate whether we could design certain multimodal interactions which would produce certain reactions and capture this using a carefully selected set of capture methods from logs to self report. In order to test the different interactions we designed a location based game that can be played on any Bluetooth enabled mobile phone that has an accelerometer. The game has been designed to interweave with a persons' normal activity: as a result there is little distinction between gaming time and non-gaming time.