The spread of small and mobile devices such as PDAs, SmartPhones or GPS systems in the last few years has been remarkable. These trends will continue in such a way that in the near future people will be surrounded by innumerable devices embedded in all kind of objects - e.g. cars, glasses, etc - that will provide us with new ways of communicating with the real world. This vision has been termed Ambient Intelligence (AmI). These devices have wireless infrastructure - i.e. Bluethooth, WiFi or GPRS - which enables them to spontaneously interact with other devices in the environment forming mobile networks. Disconnections are more frequent than in traditional distributed systems since devices have limited communication range combined with the fact that devices move about with their users. However, disconnections should not considered as errors because the connection can be automatically restored once the two devices meet again. This phenomenon has already been researched at SOFT. This research track has come up with a distributed programming language called AmbientTalk [1].

The goal of this spec training is designing and implementing an ambient game in AmbientTalk reusing Urbiflock [2]. Urbiflock is a Facebook-like application framework for mobile devices written in AmbienTalk aimed to be deployed on the Urbizone wireless network of the VUB. A user of the framework is called a flockr. The framework takes care of managing a flockr’s buddy lists, called flocks. A flock can be compared to a Facebook group: it defines a group of proximate flockrs where proximate can be defined in terms of physical distance to more abstract terms (e.g. in terms of being friends of someone). Applications can be plugged into the framework. Several viewers have been already implemented (e.g. the fiock viewer or the profile viewer) and we are currently implementing the first Urbiflock application called Guanotes. Guanotes allows flockrs to send notes to the ambient (i.e any flockr available in the surroundings or belonging to a particular
flock).

The idea of this spec training is to develop an ambient game as a new application in the Urbiflock framework. More concretely, a virtual paintball game which exploits the concept of physical proximity. The game merges aspects of traditional games with the use of real world properties such as locations of players and virtual item which are defined by means of GPS. Thus, the ultimate goal is to game on the campus with Urbiflock.

The game will be written in AmbientTalk as part of Urbiflock. AmbientTalk has been implemented on top of Java and requires a regular J2SE Java Virtual Machine supporting version 1.3 or higher. The interpreter can run on the Java 2 micro edition (J2ME) platform, under the connected device configuration (CDC). This means that AmbientTalk code can be executed on PDAs and high-end cellular phones. We are currently deploying Urbiflock in HTCP3650 Touch Cruise phones. Thus, the student could also deploy and test the game in the Urbizone network of the VUB campus as a part of their training.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information.

Jorge Vallejos - jvallejo@vub.ac.be

[1] T. Van Cutsem, S. Mostinckx, E. Gonzalez Boix, J. Dedecker, and W. De Meuter. AmbientTalk: object-oriented event-driven programming in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. SCCC 2007.
[2] Urbiflock website, 2008