Mobile phone-based mixed reality: the Snap2Play game

Abstract

The ubiquity of camera phones provides a convenient platform to develop immersive mixed-reality games. In this paper we introduce such a game which is loosely based on the popular card game “Memory”, where players are asked to match a pair of identical cards among a set of overturned cards by revealing only two cards at a time. In our game, the players are asked to match a “digital card”, which corresponds to a scene in a virtual world, to a “physical card”, which is an image of a scene in the real world. The objective is to convey a mixed-reality sensation. Cards are matched with a scene identification engine which consists of multiple classifiers trained on previously collected images. We present our comprehensive overall game design, as well as implementation details and results. We also describe how we constructed our scene identification engine and its performance. Finally, we present an analysis of player surveys to gauge the potential market acceptance.