Pervasive Games and Critical Applications

This chapter first introduces the preliminary concepts of pervasive games by describing two variants of pervasive games. Taking technical applications as a starting point, the chapter addresses the main challenges relating to the design, development and evaluation of pervasive games "Plug: Secrets of the Museum (PSM)" and "SoundPark". The chapter then talks about two critical ubiquitous applications. The first aim is to facilitate diagnosis of road accidents by providing a system of distributed black boxes on communicating vehicles. The second aim is to guide firefighters toward artwork that needs to be saved during a fire in a museum. These two applications have their critical character in common, and their specification and design is therefore subject to particular attention and extensive experimentation for the former. The chapter concludes with a summary of the challenges and promising research directions.