Interactive City Game Uses GPS/Cellphone Wand
Having written already today about Nokia's attempts at augmented reality, here's another implementation of geo-aware interactivity. REXplorer is a permanent, pervasive game played in Regensburg, a German city with highly preserved medieval architecture. Players, usually students or tourists, use GPS-enabled "wands" each containing a modified Nokia N70 cellphone and Bluetooth GPS receiver to interact with historical and fictional characters and areas in the city. The brief to design and manufacture the wand-controllers was given to a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
It's an interesting concept, and has intriguing similarities to the Wiimote controller that Nintendo has grabbed so many headlines with lately.