MAGELLAN’s overall vision is to enhance the creativity of game designers by establishing a web platform for cost-effectively authoring, publishing, executing, and experiencing location based games.
This unique integrated web-based infrastructure will be targeted at both skilled professional authors, but also at everyday authors without deep technical skills. MAGELLAN will be underpinned by scientific research into the principles and technologies of creative and location-based experiences in order to ensure that the platform is innovative while also extending our broader scientific understanding of creativity.
Given this vision, the main objectives of MAGELLAN are:
Creativity for Location-Based Games
To undertake foundational scientific research into the techniques of creativity for location-based games, from high-level concepts, to multimodal authoring, to the underlying technologies of location-based computing, so as to ensure the novelty and effectiveness of our platform.
This will produce, among other significant scientific results, a Guide for Authors of Location-based Experiences that will constitute a reference for people interested in such experiences as well as a foundational reference for future research in the field.
Integrated and Collaborative Visual Authoring Environment
To research and develop an innovative integrated and collaborative visual authoring environment dedicated to the creation and publication of new forms of multiplayer location-based games, and to validate this through trials involving a community of users across Europe.
This requires addressing a variety of technological challenges in an integrated and holistic way so as to create a usable and powerful online production environment in which a wide variety of creative people, from professional developers and web designers to dedicated amateurs and even children, can work. It is indeed a blend of a significant number of cutting-edge technologies, out of reach for the vast majority of creative industries and individual authors, as well as the location-based and often public nature of game play that gives these interactive experiences their distinctive identity and makes them so challenging to develop. Those involving multiple participants, competing or collaborating, are the most challenging.
Scalable Web Plaform
To develop a scalable web platform featuring social networking and supporting the collaborative authoring, publication, browsing and execution of a massive number of location-based games potentially involving multiple participants.
This platform aims to provide all the required tools to a community of creative people who want to author and publish location-based games, and users who are interested in participating in such experiences.