Tower of London takes visitors on a mobile adventure
Off with his head! HP provides the technology to free a virtual Guy Fawkes.
Visitors will play the virtual adventure on an HP iPaq
The Tower of London is launching a location-aware adventure game in which visitors help virtual prisoners such as Guy Fawkes and Anne Boleyn to escape from its custody.
Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower and four other palaces, is working with researchers from HP on the game developed by the Mediascape research team at HP Labs Bristol.
Players taking part in the trial hold HP iPAQ handheld devices installed with location sensors based on GPS satellite tracking technology. Digital files containing voices, images, music and clues are placed in specific locations using the HP Mediascape authoring toolkit.
As players move into a location in the Tower and its grounds, the appropriate digital file is triggered on their iPAQ, so players can meet historical prisoners in the Tower, and help them escape by avoiding patrolling Beefeaters.
Prisoners will try to persuade players to help them flee using the same methods as historically documented, including finding ropes, bribing guards and smuggling letters. Failure means the prisoner remains locked up in the virtual Tower.
‘We’re interested in exploring how new technologies can help visitors become active participants in some of the Tower’s most exciting stories,’ said Aileen Peirce, exhibition project manager at the Tower.
HP is using the game to explore opportunities for new products and services based on the delivery of location and other context-based experiences, says Josephine Reid, who is leading the HP Labs team.
‘This is part of a wider project we are running to investigate how locative services might evolve based on user experience,’ she said.
‘We think of this as a new medium, like a digital fourth dimension laid over a physical space. Understanding its value will enable us to go beyond the delivery of anything, anytime, anywhere, to the delivery of the right thing at the right time to the right place.’
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