Pervasive Gaming

A link from the Blast Theory website to IPerG, looks perfect a research source. They describe themselves as a 'pervasive gaming' consortium intended to explore the

new technologies to support the creation of new compelling forms of content.

Pervasive games are:

a radically new game form that extends gaing experiences out into the physical world.

Perfect.

The Swedish Institute of Computer Science ran the IPerG Open House Day last September, with a number of interesting sounding contributions.

The website also has some links on the project highlights, including a brief description of a thesis on emotional communication in the digital world. This was based on a project called eMoto, which is

a mobile messaging service for sending and receiving affective messages.

Their work includes looking both at the expression of emotion through body language, and theory on colour and emotion.
Anna Ståhl states that,

from the design process and the user studied we have extracted four desirable qualities when designing for emotional expressivity: to consider the media specific qualities, to provide cues of emotional expressivity building on familiarity, to be aware of contradictions between the modalities, and to open for personal expressivity.

It seems to me that these things are essential in engaging people in an outdoors interactive game.

eMoto runs on sony Ericsson's Symbian mobile phones, the P800s and P900s, which have a stylus used with their touchscreens. The stylus has had an accelerometer an a pressure sensor added to capture gestures of the user. This technology is discussed more here. But the stylus and phone cummunicate via Bluetooth. Their full presentation is accessible from the publication link here. Look at the bottom of the page.