A different vision of reality

Portal Hunt is an augmented reality location based game for mobile phones. The game is about locating and catching virtual spheres (called portals). To the naked eye, the environment looks normal, but with the power of your phone you are able to spot them. Only if you work together as a team you are able to win the game!

Playing the game

In Portal Hunt, the players explore the surrounding using their smartphone. A map overview shows the game area and the location of the portals. When the players are close to a portal, they can switch to the augmented reality view to see 3d models of the portals floating in the real world creating a mixed reality. In single player mode, a portal can be caught by physically walking into it. In multiplayer mode, however, the players must cooperate as a team. 

When they have surrounded a portal only then they can catch it. Team members need to be coordinated – and beware of other teams trying to catch the same portal! To make things more complicated, not all portals are static, but some move around and others just disappear in one spot to appear in another. Be faster than the portals!

Authoring the game

Creating your version of Portal Hunt is a simple process making use of a web-based authoring interface. Just choose a location where your game should take place, create some portals of different kinds and you can start the hunt!

Diverse and flexible

While the game mechanics are the same for every Portal Hunt game, each one is a different experience. You may change the dynamics of the game by choosing faster moving portals. You may increase the need of collaboration by requiring a larger number of players needed for catching a portal. Players can play against each other orcollaborate in teams, creating a wide range of possibilities.

Creating your version of Portal Hunt is a simple process making use of a web-based authoring interface. Just choose a location where your game should take place, create some portals of different kinds and you can start the hunt!

Technology

Portal Hunt is the world-wide first implementation of an augmented and mixed reality game based on MPEG standards.

On the end-user’s side a rich media MPEG player is installed on the mobile phone. It is a generic player able to interpret and render any kind of multimedia content, including but not limited to games. Portal Hunt is therefore not software but rather a piece of content, authored online and interpreted by the MPEG player. The novelty here consists in the integration of MPEG-V compliant interfaces for sensors, so that data from the phone’s GPS, accelerometer and magnetometer can be used for calculating the player’s position and orientation. Additional functionalities such as access to Google Maps service is implemented into a complementary application called TOTEM Services.

The advantage of this approach is the decoupling between authoring and consumption, which enables the same MPEG player to run not only Portal Hunt but any kind of augmented and mixed reality game.

Requirements

Portal Hunt is running on smartphones that have installed an MPEG-4/MPEG-V player.

Such a player for Android 2.1 and up, as well as the latest version of the TOTEM Services, is available on the Portal Hunt website:

http://www.mymultimediaworld.com/PortalHunt

There you also find the online authoring tool which enables you to create your own levels for Portal Hunt.
It can be used free of charge for non-commercial purposes.