At the end of 2009 as the IPCity project drew to a close we completed our final study of the TimeWarp Cologne game (please click on the link to find out more information and see the citation from Blum et al below). The study consisted of sixty participants and we identified six key gaming elements, relating to environment, interaction and characters that were in turn spread across physical and mental properties (see the paper form more information).  As a result we developed a set of guidelines based around these asepects and the  form and content issues associated with designing augmented reality games. This form and content split was derived from the work by Lombard and Ditton (see citation below) on virtual reality environments. Anyway for those who are interested, here is a quick summary of the guidelines that were derived. Please again check out the full paper for all the details.

• Encourage players to explore virtual elements
• Include short but intensive physical tasks
• Allow virtual characters to become meaningful in the real world
• Tap into existing emotions of players
• Confront players with meaningful decisions
• Do not focus on visual realism

My thanks again go to the other members of the TimeWarp team at Fraunhofer FIT.

The final TimeWarp: Using Form and Content to Support Player Experience and Presence when Designing Location-Aware Mobile Augmented Reality Games. Blum, L., Wetzel, R., McCall, R., and L. Oppermann. DIS 2012, Newcastle UK

Lombard, M., Ditton, T., At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1997. 3(2).