REXplorer is a mobile, pervasive spell-casting game designed for tourists of Regensburg, Germany. The game creates player encounters with spirits (historical figures) that are associated with significant buildings in an urban setting. A novel mobile interaction mechanism of "casting a spell" (making a gesture by waving a mobile phone through the air) allows the player to awaken and communicate with a spirit to continue playing the game. The game is designed to inform visitors about history in a fun manner.
NY Times 2008/04/09: My Life as a Video Game
R. Ballagas, A. Kuntze, and S. P. Walz. Gaming Tourism: Lessons from Evaluating REXplorer, a Pervasive Game for Tourists. In Pervasive '08: To appear in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing. LNCS, Springer, 2008.
Rafael Ballagas and Steffen Walz. REXplorer: Using iterative design techniques for pervasive games. In Carsten Magerkurth and Carsten Röcker, editors, Pervasive Gaming Applications - A Reader for Pervasive Gaming Research, volume 2. Shaker Verlag, 2007.
Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz, Sven Kratz, Claudia Fuhr, Eugen Yu, Martin Tann, Jan Borchers, and Ludger Hovestadt. REXplorer: A Mobile, Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists. In CHI '07: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1929-1934, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.
Steffen P. Walz, Rafael Ballagas, Jan Borchers, Joel Mendoza, Sven Kratz, Christoph Wartmann, Claudia Fuhr, Martin J. Tann, Dong Youn Shin, Bilal Hameed, Laszlo Bardos, and Ludger Hovestadt. Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative and Gesture Recognition Multiplayer Smartphone Game for Tourists. In Proc. PERGAMES, Third International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications at PERVASIVE 2006, Dublin, Ireland, May 2006. LNCS.
