DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND USABILITY OF A LOCATION-BASED GAME

2022-9-02
Badali Naghadeh, Faraz
Location-based games (LBG) have been created with the aim of blending reality with the virtual world. At its core, LBGs utilize user location as the main element since they can be played almost anywhere. The LBGs have been reported to positively affect several aspects of the player’s life, such as increasing exercise, learning about the environment, and socialization. These characteristics have led to the implementation of location-based games in education, tourism, and even health-related fields. Many studies have focused on the social aspect, game design, and creating a game world based on real-world locations. In this thesis, an LBG based on the campus of Middle East Technical University is designed and developed. The aim is to evaluate the usability and the interaction experience of players with the real and virtual points of interest in the environment. Ten students participated in a test to play the game. Furthermore, an interview was conducted after the test to evaluate the usability of the game and player’s experience with interacting with the points of interest. The game logs and in-game statistics were also used to support the interview findings. The results showed that all the players had a positive attitude toward playing the game. Regarding the points of interest, the majority chose the interaction with points related to physical objects as they could learn about the real-world locations by interacting from a virtual world.

Suggestions

Developing building information modelling based virtual reality and mixed reality environments for architectural design and improving user interactions with serious games
Ergün, Oğuzcan.; Sürer, Elif; Department of Modeling and Simulation (2019)
Virtual Reality (VR) provides an interactive experience for its users in a fully artificial computer-simulated environment while Mixed Reality (MR) forms environments by mixing the real world and the virtual world elements together. In the first part of this thesis, an architectural visualization and design tool, which is based on Building Information Modeling (BIM), is developed for VR, MR and personal computer (PC) environments. BIM provides detailed information and tools to professionals so that they can...
Frequency Domain Scattering Delay Networks for Simulating Room Acoustics in Virtual Environments
De Sena, Enzo; Hacıhabiboğlu, Hüseyin; Cvetkovic, Zoran (2011-11-28)
Modelling, simulation and auralisation of room acoustics plays an important role in computer games and virtual reality applications by increasing the level of realism. Accurate simulation of room acoustics is a computationally costly process which is often substituted with artificial reverberators that provide a computationally simpler alternative. However, such systems lack the accuracy and are not in general able to accurately simulate important aspects of room acoustics such as early reflections, source/...
Flow Experiences of Adolescents in Terms of Internet Cafe Environment and Computer Game Play Characteristics
Kara, Nuri; Çağıltay, Kürşat (2013-02-16)
The aim of this study is to investigate the flow experiences of adolescents who play computer games at an Internet cafe environment. Observations and interviews were used in order to collect data from 21 adolescents aged 14 to 20 years. Results indicated that the Internet cafe social environment that include several activities such as talking to each other and helping other players while playing had a positive effect on the flow experiences of adolescents. While game genre, goal, and visual appearance incre...
Three Dimensional Virtual Worlds Research Trends and Future Directions
Tokel, Saniye Tuğba (2014-04-01)
Use of three-dimensional virtual world platforms has been increasing worldwide. These online multi-user spaces, where users move and interact in a simulated three-dimensional spaces, provide many opportunities for learning and teaching process. Educators worldwide have been experimenting to use these technologies by investing on research and development. The purpose of this study is to analyze research trends in three-dimensional virtual world literature. The results of the study will provide a roadmap to t...
Developing a Scenario-Based Video Game Generation Framework for Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality Environments
Sürer, Elif (2019-03-01)
The 15th Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces - eNTERFACE 2019 - Summary of the Project Description: Video games are widely used software which mainly aim to entertain their users with interaction mechanisms, scenarios and game objects [1]. Serious games [2] are video games which have other purposes rather than only environment —i.e. education, training, rehabilitation and emergency planning [3]. In serious games, developed environments act as testbeds and give the opportunity to test different possibil...
Citation Formats
F. Badali Naghadeh, “DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND USABILITY OF A LOCATION-BASED GAME,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.