Design and evaluation of a location-based virtual city system for mobile phones

We are developing a virtual city system with a model that consists of virtual architectural objects and virtual creatures, geographically overlaid onto the real world. People who have mobile terminals with location sensors like GPS can visit the virtual city when walking about in a real city. The most important aspect of our research is that we have adopted current market mobile phones. In this paper we describe a prototype of virtual city system and its evaluation. The result of evaluation suggests that subjects were very much interested in the virtual city system. Technical problems have been revealed by the evaluation but most of them will be solved or minimized if we use the next generation of mobile phones.