Multi-player gaming in public transport crowd: Opportunities and challenges

Smart devices are supporting emerging types of location-based gaming applications to attain collaborations among collocated users in public places like transports. However, they are facing many challenges like the timely performance of back-end game servers for runtime game operation, unreliable cellular network connections, and opportunistic and dynamic local environment. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose “CrowdMoG”, a Crowd based Mobile Gaming platform, to identify and match the nearby passengers on the move according to their associated gaming preferences, and provides the smooth session handoff to enable the continuity of existing game plays when participants leave the game due to different mobility patterns. We therefore describe the potential, along with challenges and opportunities that open up the new dimension for the entire research community to redesign and examine a tradition problem, fundamentally transforming it into a new era of mobile gaming experience.