Mobile games and museums, wrap up of post-MW2010 unconference session

Although the most popular location based mobile games, Foursquare and Gowalla, still have limited user bases, their potential is huge. At the moment, Facebook has over 100 million mobile users, a number that is growing with the second.

As a part of the official post-MW2010 programme, Paul Stork and I hosted an unconference session about mobile games and museums. These are my notes, please add your thoughts and opinions through the comments. I’ll add them to the post to create a full document on mobile games and museums.

What is mobile gaming?

Both Foursquare and Gowalla work alike. Based on your location you can check in to a venue, be it a bar, a museum, or whatever. By doing so you let your friends know your location, but you also enter a competition. You can earn badges, become the mayor of a place, score points, etc.

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Mobile augmented reality to turn our country into a museum

Last Friday I met Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald from SPRXMobile. He gave me a demonstration of a new application they built, named Layar. Layar is, according to their website, a free application for your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality though the camera of the mobile phone.

Currently it’s only available on Android phones. In the near future, however, it might become available for the iPhone as well.

Layar is a browser. On top of the image of the camera in a mobile phone, this browser displays an information layer. For instance, the location of all ATMs around you. A small dot shows you the direction and the distance of an ATM. Once you select one ATM, you can get additional information about this ATM. Also, you can call a map to see how to get to this ATM from your current position. Read the rest of this entry »