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VU participates in Google's Android Challenge

Two Ph.D. students from the Computer Science department participate in Google's 2nd Android Challenge with innovative multiplayer smartphone game. Roelof Kemp and Nick Palmer have created a game called PhotoShoot in which two players fight a Duel "to the death" with their mobile phones. This game is their entry in the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC-2) initiated by Google.

On the 24th of September the public voting round for the second Android Developers challenge began. Android is a new operating system for smartphones developed by Google. To stimulate the creation of new and innovative applications, Google has issued a challenge for the best Android smartphone application with 2 million dollars in total prize money. The challenge consists of two voting rounds. The first round consists of a public voting round, in which every Android-powered smartphone owner can vote for the best application in 10 different categories. The best 20 submissions of each category will then be judged in the second voting round by a panel of judges selected by Google with the best in each category winning $100,000. The overall best application will receive an additional $150,000 dollars for a total of $250,000 in prize money.

The computer science department of the VU participates in this challenge with an innovative game: "PhotoShoot - The Duel", a new "Augmented Reality" gaming experience which allows players to fight a Duel with their phones as weapons, photographs as bullets and each other as targets. PhotoShoot makes extensive use of the features available on modern smartphones. In addition to the camera, it uses a sensor to detect whether both players take their steps before the duel starts and the built-in compass to detect whether one of the players turns around before it is allowed. Then when the game starts, both players aim at each other and shoot with the phone's camera. In order to see whether a shot hit the opponent, the smartphone analyzes the image and runs face detection on it. The first player that shoots a photo with the opponent's face in the crosshairs, wins the game.

PhotoShoot is a completely novel example of augmented reality gaming that is only possible with the new smartphone platform. By using the sensors in the phone to detect players movements as well as the camera and built in networking the application makes excellent use of the features available on Android powered devices. The game also uses novel "photo" based pairing of the phones using the popular 2D bar codes, called QR codes, and extensive pictoral instructions adding to the polished feel of the application.

PhotoShoot has been developed by Nick Palmer and Roelof Kemp, both Ph.D. students at the Vrije Universiteit, as part of the Ibis Research Project, which focuses on efficient communication between compute devices in dynamic environments.

 "Owners of a Google Android phone can participate in the Android Challenge.They can download a judging application that will download one of the participating applications.Once they get the PhotoShoot application, they find a fellow-android owner with the same PhotoShoot application, and can togethertry out the game. People who can do this are encouraged to install the judging application andtry PhotoShoot & vote for it"

- Android: http://www.android.com/
- Android Developers Challenge: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/
- (VU) Ibis project: http://www.cs.vu.nl/ibis