Abstract:

The PlanetarySystemGO is a location-based augmented reality game that can be played in a smartphone with components such as camera, Global Position System (GPS), gyroscope and accelerometer. The player needs to walk in the real world to find virtual objects, which are orbits and planets of planetary systems that appear on the screen of the mobile phone. The real environment, captured by the smartphone camera, is the place where the player is moving when playing the game. A back office system provides the development of the application in the mobile phone and is responsible for managing learning objects and data, through a web application running in a web browser.

When the celestial bodies are found, information about their characteristics is provided by the system and a multiple-choice question needs to be answered. At each stage of the game the player gains points as he succeeds by either finding the planets’ orbits, the celestial bodies or answering the questions correctly. The scores are displayed in the mobile phone screen and, at the end of the game, the player can compare his score with the other players. During this process, the player learns contents related to the celestial bodies he found. Furthermore, the answers given to the multiple-choice questions provide assessment of his knowledge about the several celestial bodies. In the end, all the collected data provided by the player’s experience is made available to the teacher through the back office. Therefore, the teacher can access the scores of each student and the answers that each student gave to each question.

In this paper we discuss the improvement of some aspects of PlanetarySystemGO, namely the performance of the mobile app and the player immersivity, through the integration of the information of several sensors and the use of frameworks to reduce the sensor reading inaccuracies. Other improvements featured in this paper include the gathering and transmission of play statistics, such as play time, question answering time, number of attempts, among others, to the back-office subsystem. In a multiplayer context, another key issue, addressed in this release of PlanetarySystemGO, is the synchronization among the players’ mobile devices. Finally, in this paper we also present the integration of the game experience at the front-office level, featuring the visualization, by the teacher or instructor, at the front-office web portal, of the players’ game experience and statistics, namely the location of the mobile devices. These features seem to lead to an increased capability of teachers to detect the students’ difficulties, while improving the students’ immersive experience.

Keywords:

Augmented reality, location-based systems, mobile computing, web programming, Solar System.