Living in a digital world

Location Based Services part 2 – HP’s Mscape

In my last post I mentioned that I had recently been playing with Mscape, the geolocation platform developed by HP Labs in Bristol.

In the video “Roku’s Reward” (above), we are shown HP’s vision of what Mscape might be able to do in the future. Apart from a crushingly unimaginative take on the target audience (after the Wii has already established that innovation in games can engage more than just teenage boys), it suggests a few interesting ideas.

Unfortunately the most noticeable one – viewing ‘through’ a device to see a virtual world replace the real one in real-time – is the furthest from fruition, and also arguably the least practical. It certainly seems highly unlikely that their prediction in April 2007 - that such technology was just two years away -will come to pass.

Right now, the Mscape platform allows anyone to program ‘mediascapes’, which are flash- or html-based applications that can take advantage of the GPS data provided by a mobile device. Despite being a fairly hefty compromise on the vision set out in Roku’s Reward, this is still enough to create some very interesting new experiences.

User-created mediascapes can be uploaded to the Mscape site for anyone to download, try, or edit for their own purposes. The site has been running since April 2007, but hasn’t reached a huge audience (the most popular mediascape clocking just 672 downloads at the time of writing), partly because of the relatively narrow hardware requirements.

Another factor that constrains growth is the fact that geolocation applications are, by definition, based on a specific real-world location, or ‘anchored’ in Mscape’s terminology. It is still possible to write ‘portable’ mediascapes, which can be played anywhere, but these can never fully exploit the power of the platform – the ability to lay a virtual world over the real one, and leverage the interactions that emerge.

Playing with mediascapes

Consequently, I began my Mscape experience by travelling to Bristol, where there are many anchored mediascapes that have been written for locations around the city. As can be expected with user generated content in a new medium, the quality and usability of the mediascapes varied widely, but I quickly gained a feel for what was possible, and to my mind it seemed mediascapes tended to do one of two things.

Some mediascapes take an existing idea and play it out in a new way. The introductory game you are recommended to try first is just ‘whack a mole’ – you set up three locations in an open area, and then whack moles you are told are coming up in these zones simply by running over to them. Another example is a treasure hunt, in which clues direct you to certain places in the centre of Bristol, your GPS location confirms that you have found the place and solved the puzzle, and this triggers the mediascape to give you the next clue. In this particular case, the treasure hunt ended at a crepe van and even suggested you treat yourself to a crepe as your reward, immediately demonstrating some of the potential this field has for marketing.

Having run a couple of treasure hunts in the past myself, I was familiar with some fundamental gameplay problems that Mscape was able to easily fix. One problem is that if several teams are playing, everyone can follow whichever team solves a clue first. In Mscape, one can simply set up a number of different clues which each team visits in a different order, a final clue only being unlocked once all the others have been completed. A more significant problem is that a treasure hunt is no fun at all if a team gets stuck on one particular clue, as there is absolutely nothing more they can do. With Mscape, you can time how long a team has been stuck on a clue, and have hints automatically revealed at appropriate intervals.

With the help of my friend Richard Loxley‘s consummate programming skills, I designed a mediascape treasure hunt set in Regents Park, and ran it for 36 people. It was notably more successful than my previous treasure hunts, particularly in that all the participants had a lot of fun - not just those that found the treasure!

Of course, the other class of things you can do with geolocation technology is things that were never possible before. Among these is my personal favourite of the mediascapes I tested in Bristol, “In 10 seconds“.

“In 10 seconds” is not just a mediascape. It has an introductory short film and a website to be explored first, which is a smart way of building up associations with the location while also establishing back-story. It centres around a ghost story, which requires a particular kind of atmosphere that one does not tend to find in the public park in which the mediascape is located. However, there is another dimension to be considered in the creation of such an experience – time. The mediascape recommends that you play at dusk, and as this is also the time at which the short film was shot this will reinforce the associations. (I myself ended up playing it at midnight, which was also extremely effective!)

One of the things a mediascape creator has a lot of control over is audio, which as Mark Kermode has noted is a key part of creating a chilling experience. “In 10 seconds” uses location-triggered sound to great effect – ghostly voices rush past you, you hear a gate slam shut just after you pass through it, the creak of a playground swing grows louder as you approach even though you can see it is quite still. The sound design of “In 10 seconds” was the finishing touch to a really fascinating experience that could not have been created in any other medium.

Working again with Richard, I produced something similarly new, although not as profound as In 10 Seconds. A full write-up will shortly appear on the Mscape blog, but it essentially involved using the mobile device as a virtual Geiger counter, with the familiar clicking sound of radiation being triggered by location in order to allow teams to track down virtual radiation hotspots – much to the confusion of members of the public! For the finalé, we shot video in the same location as the players found themselves in, which could then be displayed on the devices themselves to give the impression of having a window on a parallel world – a simple way of approaching the kind of experience shown in Roku’s Reward. The illusion was heightened by arranging for teams in different locations to see footage from appropriately different angles.

Given all the above, it should hopefully be clear that the possibilities offered by this technology are huge – too huge, in fact, to easily comprehend. I will go in to the framework I use to try to grasp how this could be used in marketing in the third and final of these posts.

For more information on Mscape, visit the website, Mscapers.com, or watch this 7-minute video from HP.

October 28, 2008 Posted by mantim | Uncategorized | geolocation, GPS, Mobile | Leave a Comment