Collaborative game in a shared physical space

Abstract

Despite the phone’s capability to interact with the physical world around us, there is a lack of mobile games out in the market that combines both the physical and virtual world together. The project aims to utilize SALib, an Android-based library that projects a physical arena onto a virtual space, to create an educational game that is intuitive, promotes team-building and is fun to play. Balloon Party is designed and developed as a result, a game that tests and trains the player’s spatial memory. A user study was conducted to assess the game on how well it achieved the project’s aim. The game is proven to be able to promote team-building, with a large majority of the players in the user study communicating and working together to complete the game effectively. But due to a design and development oversight, the assessment on the intuitiveness and fun factor of the game are dampened due to an oversight during design and development.