Ubiquitous Game Case Study
The application:
More than a hundred players and phones, 5-meter tall giant inflatable animals designed by an artist in the UK, $5000 prizes, semacodes nodes on billboards, on buses, and on a taxi navigating the streets.
It's an urban mobile treasure hunt, with 5 teams from local high schools racing to be the first to find $5000 in treasure - and win the money to keep it for their school.
Teams had to first capture one of many zones by carrying a 5 meter high animal totem (cougar, lion, eagle...) for their team into the zone base. Once there, they checked in and out with semacode nodes. If two teams vyed for control of a zone, they battled it out with a bidding war: the winner got the zone and the loser got their money.
The game was played in Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Phoenix.
The hardware:
150 Nokia 6225 camera phones.
The nodes:
The production team hid 350 semacode nodes around a rounghly 10x10 block area of the downtown. Some were in plain sight - others were only available if you talked to the right person. Each node gave a clue to find another one, and if you got enough node in your zone, you could find the SUPERCLUE, worth hundreds of dollars.
Technical achievements:
Semacode Corporation deployed its pre-release Semacode Server. By configuring the server software to work with their existing MMS server systems, Ubiquity Labs was able to build the application using only the MMS and SMS capabilities of the phones.



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