Flying cake: Augmented game on mobile devices

In the current age of ubiquitous computing via high bandwidth networks, wearable and hand-held mobile devices with small cameras and wireless communication will become widespread in the near future. Thus, research on augmented games for mobile devices has recently attracted a lot of attention. Most existing augmented games use a traditional “backpack” system and “pattern marker”. However, ‘backpack’ systems are expensive, cumbersome, and inconvenient to use, while the use of a pattern marker means the game can only be played at a previously installed location. Hence, this article proposes an augmented game, called Flying Cake, where face regions are used to create virtual objects (characters) without a predefined pattern marker, plus the location of the virtual objects are measured relative to the real world on a small mobile PDA instead of using cumbersome hardware. Flying Cake is an augmented shooting game with two playing modes: (1) single player, where the player attacks a virtual character overlaid on images captured by a PDA camera in the physical world; and (2) two players, where each player attacks a virtual character in an image received via a wireless LAN from their opponent. The virtual character overlaps a face region obtained using a real-time face-detection technique. As a result, Flying Cake provides an exciting experience for players on the basis of a new game paradigm where the user interacts with both the physical world captured by a PDA camera and the virtual world.