Implementations and evaluations of location-based virtual city system for mobile phones

A system platform for location-based entertainment applications of mobile phones is described. With GPS and electronic compasses, some of today's mobile phones have rich functions for such entertainment as role playing games, treasure hunting, sightseeing with virtual information, etc. Our system model can manage virtual worlds that can be overlaid onto the real world with regard to location (latitude and longitude). Each virtual world is a set of virtual architectural objects and virtual creatures. Virtual creatures are active objects that can interact with users. In this paper, browser-based and BREW-based systems for virtual worlds are described. BREW is an efficient software platform for mobile phones. It enables autonomous location sensing and automatic redrawing, which will solve most of the problems found in evaluation sessions of the browser-based version.