Developing pervasive games in interactive spaces: the JUGUEMOS toolkit

The progress in the development of pervasive games is slowing down because of the multiple challenges that these games brings to developers, due to the great variety of interaction paradigms that this kind of games involve and the difficulties of developing applications where so many innovative technologies converge. In this article we present JUGUEMOS, a toolkit aimed at developers to help them in the creation of pervasive games for Interactive Spaces. The toolkit addresses three challenges that arise when developing pervasive games: the integration of heterogeneous devices, the management of multiple displays and the facilitation of the game coding. The toolkit is based on the TUIML modeling language that allows defining games easily, reducing the impact of the coding between iterations. The toolkit also makes use of the OSC Protocol to interconnect the different devices. Detailed descriptions of the toolkit design decisions, architecture and implementation are presented, together with three different case studies carried out in order to explore the toolkit expressivity, its capability to support collaborative multidisciplinary experiences, and its potential to support interactive experiences outside our Interactive Space. We hope this work would contribute to the spread of pervasive games in interactive spaces.