And now for something completely different…
For those who like to know all about the nuts and bolts of how things work, I’d like to talk a little about the technology behind Post-Human. We’re using some off-the-shelf bits, coupled with some completely custom web applications, and mashing them together to create a seamless, playable experience.
The most noticeable component is the augmented reality app we use to navigate the game, called Layar. Layar is a free app for iOS and Android devices that allows almost any type of content (audio, video, image, text, website) to be located in the physical world and overlaid on what your device’s rear-facing camera sees. Points of interest (POIs) can be geocoded to GPS coordinates (the most popular option) or maybe be triggered by visual recognition of a specific place/photo/object (new and more tricky). Some cool examples of what’s possible can be found here: http://layar.com/browser/showcases/
We use Layar to overlay our fictional game world’s locations on top of the existing University of Waterloo campus by geocoding them to an accuracy of 10 metres. This let’s the player navigate the game world in the physical world. Once they arrive at a particular POI, it triggers the appropriate game screen to popup and display the relevant information, story, and/or possible actions for that location.
The POIs are fed to the Layar app from our Layar POI server running on our webserver. The Layar app works by sending a request for nearby POIs for the player’s current longitude/latitude coordinates, and our POI server sends back the POIs nearby.
Our game engine that displays story, enables players to take make decisions and take action, and keeps track of timing, score, and opening/closing the next available locations, is a custom touch-enabled web-based system built on PHP and driven by a mySQL database.
These 3 pieces all work together to anchor our fictional game locations to the physical space on campus! If I’ve not covered something sufficiently, speak up! I’ll answer questions in the comments.
Error Management 