Information technology has changed significantly since its widespread adoption from the mid-80s onwards. Despite evolving to include online social networking, virtual worlds and gaming, it generally remains a socially isolating experience. With users seek to enter a digital world that removes them from their surrounding reality. However, this is certain to change over the next few years. As interest in urban mixed-reality technologies extending from location-aware games or social networking expands to include other technologies, this will encourage people to participate in various aspects of city life. Indeed, this trend is already gaining momentum with location-aware augmented reality applications such as Layer, Wikitude or the results from research project such as IPCity.
Overview of IPCity
IPCity was a four year research project partially funded by the European Commission which ran until March 2010. The project consisted of partners from across Europe and New Zealand. The vision of the IPCity project was to increase the involvement of citizens or other interested parties within the urban experience, enhancing it through the use of range of mixed reality technologies.
These experiences ranged from storytelling applications where citizens could create, upload and share location-based stories about their own lives, through to location-aware games, urban redesign tools and large-scale displays. The emphasis was always on connecting the technology to some underlying aspects of the city, whether this was within a game context relating to the history of a city or being proposed through building plans.
Location-Aware Technologies
TimeWarp is a two-player cooperative location-aware augmented reality game set in Cologne, Germany. In contrast with previous versions of the game which were single player and used head-mounted displays, each player carries an ultra-mobile PC, one ultra-mobile PC acts as a lens into the new augmented world.
Through this device, the player can see and interact with virtual content, characters or locations. The second ultra-mobile PC acts as a navigation device.
In operation players walk around the city using an included GPS sensor that provides location information while an inertial sensor attached to the first device provides device orientation information. The interaction techniques are quite simple and are based around the proximity of the players to the content, together with the combination of a point-click style approach.
The game content itself is based around the legend of the Heinzelmännchen (small elves, see Figure 1). The players must visit various time periods (see Figure 2) and decide whether to rescue or banish the Heinzelmännchen. They go to different time periods by jumping through the portals.
Figure 1: A Heinzelmännchen stands in front of a tent.
Games such as TimeWarp face a number of key design, technical and evaluation challenges when compared to PC or console based experiences; all of which must be taken into account in order to ensure a high quality user experience.
Firstly, it is impossible to augment an entire city with virtual people or buildings, therefore there has to be a balance between adding augmented content and providing a strong back story such that people still believe in the experience, even when there is seemingly little content around.
Furthermore, as the game takes place within an urban context therefore it is important to select locations where the ambiance complements the game play. Also unlike traditional computer games it is impossible to isolate the experience from the outside world, since, by default, almost anything can and does happen in an urban space. For example, some passersby see augmented reality gaming as invading their space and take offense at being part of something they do not understand.
Other people see the players (especially if the players are wearing strange equipment) as odd and may on occasion start asking questions or react differently. They may ask questions about what is going on or appear confused. While this may not seem overly important it does have an impact on the experience of the players, but more importantly it underscores the need to realise that such games and the hardware, must be socially acceptable to non-participants. There are also safety concerns with such technologies as players will frequently focus on the game and not so much on the surrounding environment. 
Figure 2: A view as to what the players (left) would see in the future time period and the user evaluation team (right).Consequently, requiring people to frequently cross the road, for example, is inadvisable. Additional problems arise with how people perceive the augmentations in relation to the real environment, in particular the sense of realism. For example, it is not possible with this system to have the same lighting or shadows as appears on real world objects.
Also the temptation is for players to constantly compare the real and virtual elements, therefore the decision was taken to make the characters and objects appear more cartoon like.
Urban storytellingIPCity also explored the creation and sharing of location-based stories within the urban environment.
This arose principally from the idea that at present most stories which people experience about a city are pre-decided, for example, social city tour guides or travel guide websites.
While these are useful, they lack the personal depth and knowledge which inhabitants of their city in particular underground cultural elements are often almost airbrushed from such guides. An early version of CityTales by Sony explored providing tourists with a location-based guide which ran on a mobile phone that took users round the club and bar scene of Berlin. Although this did not allow for user generated content, the feedback from users was strong enough to suggest that alternative stories about a city are entertaining and useful.
In this case it encouraged them to visit new bars or clubs that they may not have previously considered. Further work on this aspect of the project was undertaken by Imagination GesMHB developed the concept of user generated stories further, and then the technology was developed to allow end-users to create their stories and add multimedia content such as photographs or audio clips (figure 3). The final location-aware concept within the project was MapLens (Figure 3)- an application that allowed people to use paper maps along with their mobile phones in order to gain additional information.
In this system as users move the phone over the map it automatically recognises features and additional augmented in-formation is displayed. This particular system illustrated the benefit of bringing together real-world tangible objects, with augmented reality to benefit from the familiarity of using a paper map along with new forms of interaction and engagement. 
Figure 3: CityTales II(Left) Maplens (right).
Back to the future While many of the concepts within IPCity would have been dismissed as science fiction some years ago, many of the ideas now find their way directly or indirectly into everyday life.This is in part due to mobile phones including a range of sensors, high resolution displays and cameras thereby making location-aware and augmented reality experiences possible.
Furthermore, people are now more receptive to such ideas and are searching for new ways in which to use mobile devices. This general acceptance of such technologies, even if most people still lack familiarity with location-aware augmented reality etc, means that handset manufacturers and software companies are recongising the potential to generate new revenue streams, whether this is in the form of selling games, or is in the form of using location-aware technologies to encourage people to visit particular sites.
Conclusion
Another interesting possibility for these technologies is the potential to bring people back into the real world and to behave within accepted social norms. For example there have been significant discussions on the problems with computer games or the Internet, in particular whether they are responsible for social isolation and depression, or whether the excessive use leads to these problems.
This debate is heavily politicized in countries such as the US and Germany where school violence has been in part blamed on computer games – even if the evidence for this is not conclusive. In theory though, location-aware technologies may tempt some of those people back into the wider community which should be a good thing.
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Dr Rod McCall is a Research Associate at The University of Luxembourg within the Inter-disciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (www.securityandtrust.lu). Email: [email protected]. He was previously based at Fraunhofer FIT where he was co-ordinator of the IPCity project. For more information on the project and the consortium visit (www.ipcity.eu). The author acknowledges the assistance of the IPCity consortium. Images from Fraunhofer FIT, Imagination GesMBH and Aalto University.
