78 PERVASIVEcomputing Published by the IEEE CS and IEEE ComSoc ■ 1536-1268/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE

P E R V A S I V E G A M I N G

Pervasive Gaming in theEveryday World

When computers become perva-sive, they change from being alocalized tool to a constantcompanion, enabling continu-ous interaction and promoting

informal, unstructured activities without clearstarting or ending points.1 Pervasive games imple-

ment and exploit this new roleof computational technology toenhance computer game designand the computer-gaming expe-rience. Pervasive technology

offers three particularly promising dimensions ofcomputer game play:

• mobile, place-independent game play,• integration between the physical and the vir-

tual worlds, and• social interaction between players.

Pervasive-game research has produced varioustypes of games and game prototypes, emphasiz-ing different aspects of pervasive interaction.2–5

For example, the mixed-reality chase game CanYou See Me Now? implements all three dimen-sions in an experimental game design.6 In thegame, mobile runners in the streets using hand-held computers with wireless network connec-tions and GPS technology chase virtual repre-sentations of online players trying to avoidcapture. Another example is Human Pacman,which combines the physical world with the clas-sic video game Pac-Man.7 Finally, Songs of Northdemonstrates technical and design solutions forpervasive games.8 Players move through the phys-

ical world to move their character in the virtualworld, using a shaman drum as a bridge betweenthe worlds and as a game world map.

The research underlying these games hasrevealed interesting and important findingsrelated to pervasive gaming’s basic issues. How-ever, it has also revealed limitations. One suchlimitation is that people play few of the existingpervasive games in their normal everyday life,which makes studying the games’ role and effectin these situations difficult. Such research is nec-essary to help commercial designers create suc-cessful pervasive games and to help identify andexplore the issues arising when such computergaming becomes situated in the everyday world.

We’ve made an initial attempt to explore thethree dimensions of pervasive game play in thecontext of people’s everyday life. Using an ad-vanced prototype of SupaFly, a pervasive gamedeveloped by the former company It’s Alive (nowpart of Daydream, www.daydream.se), we’veevaluated how people perceive and play the gamein normal, everyday settings. Our evaluationfocused on how the players judged the designers’attempts to incorporate the three dimensions inthe game.

SupaFlyThe game is a community-based virtual soap

opera, where the players create characters andthen interact through them. By making andmaintaining relationships with other players,players score points and gain status. All inter-action occurs through mobile phones and SMS(short-message service) commands. In addition,

An empirical study examines to what extent the vision of pervasivegaming is becoming reality in the context of SupaFly, an everyday-worldpervasive game.

Kalle Jegers and Mikael WibergUmeå University, Sweden

a Web site lets players manage theircharacters and track their developmentin the game. The Web site complementsthe SMS part of the game by providinga media-rich, stationary platform forsome game activities.

The following short scenario describesthe basic game play and some of theactions that the players perform. PlayerA sends the command “SAY Hello,wanna be friends?” to Player B. PlayerB responds with the command “SAYSure!” and sends the command “RELA-TION Player A Friend” to set the statusof the relation between the two playersto be friends. Both players thereby scorepoints, some for the conversation andsome for the strengthened status of theirrelationship.

A player’s goal is to reach the highestlevel of status in the community—tobecome “Supafly.” Every action in thegame generates news that the game dis-plays in Hype, its online magazine.Depending on the sensational value of thenews (determined by the action and thestatus of the players involved), the gamecategorizes the news clips and publishesthem at different levels of the magazine.The levels award different amounts ofpoints; news with the highest sensationalvalue appears on the front page, reward-ing many points to the players involved.This overall objective and the means foraccomplishing it (interaction with otherplayers) implements the dimension ofsocial interaction to create an amusinggaming experience. The game’s design,objectives, and technical platform all aimto enhance this interaction.

The main idea is to make the gamepersistently available to the players any-time, anywhere, thereby drawing onmobile, place-independent game play toimprove the game play experience.SupaFly has no starting or ending points;it’s just there for the players to pick up

and play. Because the most critical game-playing actions are player driven (incom-ing and outgoing SMS messages) andthe game platform offers constantaccess to the game, the players can ini-tiate actions at any time. This abilityalso implies that any player at any timemight receive the outcome of anotherplayer’s initiated action, in the shape ofan SMS message.

Two aspects of the game exploit loca-tion to integrate the physical and virtualworlds. First, virtual objects (such asclothes and other items for the charac-ters) are distributed at various locations(coordinates) in the physical environ-ment. For instance, the game enginemight place a virtual pair of jeans at thelocation of a physical street corner in acity. A player can then identify and pickup an object if he or she is within a spec-ified range of it. Second, the game con-tinuously calculates the active players’geographical positions through triangu-lation in the GSM (Global System for

Mobile Communications) mobile-phonesystem. The game uses these positions toenhance the player’s awareness andunderstanding of other players. Forexample, when a player performs theSMS LOOK command, the game pre-sents a list of other nearby players whomthe player can approach for interaction.

Game playPlayers send SMS commands to locate

other players (their geographical posi-tion) or communicate with them. Thecommands go to a phone number spe-cific to the game and are then rerouted tothe receiver. With this solution, the play-ers become anonymous and stay in theirgame character because the perceivedsender will be that phone number andthe name of the sending player’s charac-ter. For example, figure 1 shows a playerusing the SAY command, which sends atext message to another player. We’lllook at some of the commands in moredetail later.

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Figure 1. A SupaFly player uses the SMS(short-message service) SAY command tosend the text “Hello!” to another playerwhose character is named Lisa.

The main idea is to make the game persistently

available to the players anytime, anywhere, to

improve the game play experience.

Figure 2 shows the Room, the Website’s main page, which has links to theNotebook and Wardrobe sections, theVideophone graphical interface, andHype. Players can use the Notebook (seefigure 3) to manage and keep track oftheir relationships. They can changetheir character’s appearance in theWardrobe, locate other players via theVideophone, and read Hype (see figure4). (The magazine is also available in anabbreviated edition via SMS.)

Designers’ predictions of the game play

From oral and visual presentations

and discussions about the game, per-formed in project meetings with mem-bers of the design team, we have ab-stracted a view of how the designerspredict the game play.

By delivering constant game accessthrough well-known everyday technol-ogy (mobile phones and the Web), thegame should blend in as a natural ele-ment of the players’ everyday context.By using the players’ geographical prox-imity to each other, the game shouldconnect the virtual community to real-world physical places. Making playersaware of other players in the surround-ing geographical area should enhance

the feeling of a constantly ongoing (any-time, anywhere) game. Such awarenessshould help remind the players aboutthe ongoing game’s existence and pro-vide interaction cues (triggering con-versation and communication). Fur-thermore, the mobility of the pervasivetechnology on which the game is imple-mented should let the players carry thegame throughout all the different con-texts of everyday life. So, players shouldalso play the game in immobile or pri-vate contexts. They should play athomes, as well as at work, at school, inpublic transportation, or in other publicspaces such as bars, coffee shops, ormalls. The situations and contexts inwhich players choose to use the gameshould depend purely on their personalrequirements and on whether they wishto have fun at a given moment.

User evaluationWe evaluated SupaFly in two itera-

tions; the first iteration’s main purposewas to develop our test methodologyand design.

ParticipantsTo recruit participants, we used pub-

lic posters and personal-recruitment

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Figure 3. In the Notebook, players keeptrack of their status in the game, theirrelations, and their overall progression.Players can form groups to which theyinvite other players. This spread displaysinformation about the other players in agroup and the group’s characteristics andpersonality. (image courtesy of DaydreamSoftware AB)

Figure 2. The Room—the main page ofthe SupaFly Web site. The page showsthe graphical presentation of a gamecharacter, Hype magazine on the coffeetable, the Notebook to the character’sleft, the Wardrobe in the background,and the Videophone just to the leftbehind the character. (image courtesy ofDaydream Software AB)

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campaigns on the Umeå University cam-pus. This process let us include peoplewho were genuinely interested in perva-sive gaming but also led to problemscontrolling the test sample. Keepingtrack of possible social relations betweenplayers (for example, if some of themalready knew each other) became diffi-cult, which could affect the game’s out-come. Statistical testing of the resultsalso became difficult because we didn’trandomly select the subjects.

For the first iteration, we recruited 16subjects, of which nine (six males andthree females) performed the completeevaluation. All nine were undergradu-ate-level university students who de-scribed themselves as experienced com-puter gamers (six played computergames every day; three played at leastonce a week). They also said they fre-quently used Internet chat rooms andcommunities (five visited chat roomsevery day; four visited chat rooms atleast once a week).

For the second iteration, we recruited42 subjects. Of these subjects, 25 (15male and 10 female) performed the com-plete evaluation. Their ages ranged be-tween 15 and 48 years; 15 of them werebetween 22 and 28 years old. Fourteenof the 25 subjects were university stu-dents, and 11 were working. Their com-puter-gaming experience ranged fromvery experienced (three played computergames every day; seven played at leastonce a week) to rather inexperienced(seven subjects very seldom playedgames; three subjects played occasion-ally). Only three visited chat rooms everyday; 18 never or almost never visitedchat rooms or communities.

Methods and procedureResearchers’ ability to study a perva-

sive-game player’s interaction with theenvironment and other players is oftenlimited because the player’s environmentand corresponding ubiquitous artifacts

aren’t directly accessible.4 Because It’sAlive designed SupaFly to be played ineveryday settings, anytime and any-where, the game design posed severalmethodological challenges for evalua-tion. An ethnographical approach,which studies players in actual gamingsituations, would perhaps be the firstchoice. However, such an approachwould require us to continuously followthe players throughout their everydaycontexts, both private and professional,to capture all potential situations ofgame play. Even if we had the resourcesto perform a complete study of this kind,serious issues would exist concerning theplayers’ privacy and integrity.

Instead, to compensate for the lack ofopportunity to study the game play “live,”we combined three other methods:

• system logs of user activities,• a qualitative questionnaire, and• focus group interviews.

Both iterations started with a periodof unrestricted game play. In the first iter-ation, we let players use either mobilephones or the Web to perform all thegaming activities, both communicative

and administrative. The possibility ofcommunicating through the Web re-sulted in low use of mobile phones. So,in the second iteration, we restricted theplayers to mobile phones for communi-cating and the Web for administrativeactivities, such as keeping track of theirstatus and the community’s overall sta-tus. In that iteration, we recorded all theactivities performed through mobilephones (SMS commands and messages)in system logs to give a complete pictureof the overall in-game traffic and thecontent of the players’ conversations.

In both iterations, a qualitative ques-tionnaire captured the players’ subjec-tive impressions of the game and theirnotion of the activities they had per-formed. The questionnaire included bothopen-ended questions with free-textanswering and multiple-choice ques-tions. Question topics included specificfunctions in the game, overall game play,usability and playability, and gamingbehavior (contexts, situations and timeof the day when the game was played,and so on). We distributed the question-naire as a Web form, which subjectsfilled out immediately after the periodsof game play.

In the second iteration, we invitednine participants to focus group ses-sions (one group of four and one groupof five participants) to elaborate theresults from the questionnaires. Weselected the participants on the basis oftheir relative level of engagement in thegaming activities, ranging from thosewho were rather inactive (only a fewSMS messages sent) in the game to per-sons who were very active (many SMSmessages sent). The focus groups dis-cussed issues ranging from generalopinions of the game design and gameplay to overall impressions and experi-ences from the different contexts andsettings in which the participants hadplayed the game.

Table 1 summarizes the iterations.

Figure 4. The front page of Hypemagazine, where all actions performed in the game become news. A player who initiates an action that becomes front-page news receives many points. (TheURL in the picture isn’t active.) (imagecourtesy of Daydream Software AB)

Empirical results andimplications

Because we used the first iterationmainly to inform the second one, we focuson the second iteration’s evaluation.

Table 2 summarizes the in-game traf-fic the participants performed. The high-est number of SMS messages a subject

sent in the game was 103; the lowestnumber was one.

As table 3 shows, the most commonlyused SMS commands were LOOK andSAY. Because the game’s major activity isplayer interaction, we expected this out-come. Players need LOOK to find otherplayers to interact with, and SAY is the

most immediate command for initiatinginteraction or engaging in conversation.

Were they playing anytime,anywhere?

Our evaluation revealed that the par-ticipants played the game in a ratherunexpected way, considering the de-signers’ intentions for game play. Theydidn’t play the game in a mobile fashion(at a number of different locations and indifferent contexts) but in a rather immo-bile way in their homes.

In the questionnaire, 20 of the 25 sub-jects stated that they most often playedthe game at home in their spare time.Two questionnaire responses reflect ouroverall findings:

I generally played the game athome, in my couch. Mainly becausethis is the context in which I spendmost of my spare time, when notworking. —Subject A

I mostly played the game at home,since I’m mostly at home when I’mnot in school. —Subject B

Of the other five subjects, two usuallyplayed at work, two usually played atthe pub, and one usually played at herparents’ house:

I played whenever I got incomingmessages. This was mostly when Iwas at work. —Subject C

One subject who played the game atwork offered an interesting explanationduring the focus group interviews:

Since I have a habit of immedi-ately answering all SMSs I get, Iplayed the game at work and at

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TABLE 1The evaluation iterations.

Time spent Responses to Period Number of participants with the game questionnaire Focus group participants

Spring 2003 16 3 weeks 9 (6 males, 3 females) —

Winter 2003–2004 42 (27 males, 15 females) 2 weeks 25 (15 males, 10 females) 9 (2 males, 2 females& 2 males, 3 females)

TABLE 2General gaming activities.

Summary of game traffic Total

Number of SMS (short-message service) messages the participants sent 1,461

Average number of SMS messages each participant sent 34.8

Number of SMS commands used 67

Number of incorrect (non-SupaFly) commands used 38

TABLE 3The 13 (out of 67) most-used SMS commands.

Command Purpose Total

LOOK Locate nearby players and objects 300

SAY Send an SMS message to another player 290

Y Respond yes (to requests) 187

KISS Try to kiss another player 126(the other player must accept the kiss)

HIT Virtually punch another player 107

RELATION Specify the relation to another player 78(examples are friend, good friend, enemy, and girlfriend)

WHISPER Not a valid command* 69

STATUS Show the personal status (level) 65

GIVE Not a valid command* 46

SHOUT Not a valid command* 46

CHAT Not a valid command* 45

PICKUP Pick up a virtual object near the player 45

SELL Not a valid command* 44

*These commands are examples of some of the 38 non-SupaFly commands that players used(see table 2).

home. It’s interesting in a way, sinceI normally don’t play the games atwork, but I considered the gameSMSs to be like any other SMS I get, so I just answered them.

—Subject D

In the questionnaire, the respondentsestimated at what times they playedmost often. Their responses reveal thatthey played the game mostly between 1p.m. and midnight (nine subjects playedmostly between 1 and 5 p.m.; 13 sub-jects played mostly between 5 p.m. andmidnight). The SMS activity log data (inthis case, the time of each player’s peakactivity) supports these estimates. Thefollowing quotations illustrate the mainreason for choosing this part of the day:

I just had most of my availabletime at nights, and I also think thatnight is the time of day when youfeel like you want to relax, playgames, and have fun. —Subject A

This time of day is the normaltime for communication with yourfriends, after work. —Subject E

Evenings and nights were the nat-ural times of the day to play, sinceI’m not working then. —Subject F

Combining the results regarding whereand when the participants played thegame, we conclude that they played thegame mainly at evenings and nights athome during their leisure time.

The deep cultural division betweenwork and recreation contexts9 mightexplain this observation. The participantsrelate computer games to recreational orleisure time, so they use the game at homebecause they normally spend a lot of theirrecreational time at home. The players’lack of mobility would then be a conse-quence of this attitude.

Considering the two subjects whostated that they played the game mostly atwork, the picture becomes somewhatmore problematic. Both subjects stated in

the focus group interviews that they nor-mally don’t play computer games at workbut that they considered the SMS gameactivities in SupaFly as different from tra-ditional computer game playing. Theyexplained that they normally and regu-larly respond instantly to all the SMS mes-sages they get on their mobile phones andthat they always carry their mobilephones with them throughout the day. So,they didn’t consider the SMS messagesfrom other players as different from anyother SMS messages they receive. Becausethe time to respond to these messages isshort, they claimed, the game’s intrusionduring work hours was so limited that itdidn’t become an issue. Another factorlimiting the intrusion was that the tworespondents received most of their gameSMS messages during evenings and veryfew during work, which could be due tohow most other participants played thegame. Because all game actions are playerinitiated and most participants played thegame in the afternoon and evening, gametraffic during regular office hours wasgenerally low.

Those two subjects’ decision to playthe game during what they classify aswork time seems to run contrary to howpeople generally separate activities intowork and recreation, pursued at sepa-rate times. This observation calls for fur-ther research considering pervasive gam-ing’s anytime, anywhere aspect to clarifyto what extent pervasive games mightchallenge people’s conception of socialcontexts and related activities.

The empirical results lead to a designimplication: the “mobile, place-inde-pendent game play” idea might benefitfrom being turned inside out. That is,we should consider place- or location-dependent game design in which play-ers must move around at a specific loca-tion (instead of being able to play thegame “anywhere,” which in our studywas realized in most cases through“sofa gaming”).

How about the integration of thephysical and the virtual?

Analysis of the focus group data re-veals that the game’s integration of thephysical and virtual worlds was of lim-ited importance to the players. The gen-eral opinion of this specific part of thegame design was that the integration wassomewhat “cool” but of limited or nosignificance for the overall game play.Only one subject commented on the inte-gration as positive and enriching:

The triangulation and place inde-pendency adds an interesting dimen-sion to the game. —Subject E

The following quotations better reflectmost players’ opinions:

Some functions were completelyirrelevant, such as the ability to pickup virtual objects in my nearby envi-ronment. It costs me real money interms of SMS charges; one for find-ing an item and then another chargefor picking it up. Why would I dothis? I can buy items in the magazinewithout spending hard cash!

—Subject A

I think the integration between thephysical place of yourself and thevirtual place of your character wassomewhat unclear. I think this aspectwould be more meaningful and funif there actually were more players inthe game. As it was now, the connec-tion between my physical place andthe game was totally unimportant; Ijust talked to the characters that hadnames I could remember. Maybe thiswould be different if there weremore players in my surroundings.

—Subject F

From our evaluation, we concludethat the implemented integration of thephysical and the virtual, based on loca-tion of players and virtual objects, wasinsufficient to be a meaningful andenriching part of the game. However, asSubject F mentioned, the perception ofthis particular implementation might bedifferent if more people were playing thegame. If the critical mass of players

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needed to make this game design suc-cessful is higher than the 42 active play-ers in this evaluation, our observationsconcerning this dimension of pervasivegaming might be misleading.

So, the most important conclusionregarding this dimension might be thatwe must explore it further to betterunderstand how to meaningfully inte-grate these worlds in pervasive-gamedesigns. It’s still somewhat unclearwhether location is sufficient to success-fully implement this integration.

This vision of tight integration has sofar been about accessing the virtual partof the game anywhere, anytime. Thisintegration can become much moreinterdependent so that players mustperform actions in both the real worldand virtual worlds to keep the gamegoing. On a general level, this is aboutfinding and placing appropriate game-playing rules and constraints on perva-sive gaming instead of focusing on justthe enabling components. This is simi-lar to managing brainstorming sessions,where putting constraints on the brain-storming process is important—forexample, telling participants that theymust tackle a specific problem and thatthey may not use the most obviousmeans to reach a solution (as opposedto just bringing together a group of peo-ple and asking them to discuss smartideas on any topic they prefer).

What kind of social interaction actually occurred?

We noticed that the players seemed touse the game to facilitate existing socialinteraction in groups that they belongedto before they played the game:

I think I am expected to meet newfriends in the game, but I mainlycommunicated with people I alreadyknew when I played the game.

— Subject F

A possible explanation for this com-

mon phenomenon could be that thegame lacks activities that trigger newsocial interactions:

There should be more sharedactivities in the game, like forinstance different tasks, quests, andteam competitions. Those kind ofactivities would give you [the play-ers] a common point to gatheraround, and something to actuallydiscuss when you interact in thegame, instead of just SMS the usual“Hey, how are you” to as manyplayers as possible to earn points.

—Subject G

I think the game should have morefeatures that make it easier to starttalking to other players. There couldbe some kind of bulletin board orsome kind of contests that you couldstart to discuss. As it is now, youdon’t have anything in common todiscuss if you don’t already know theother player. —Subject A

Considering the subjects’ opinions, weconclude that the game’s design doesn’tsufficiently support meaningful socialinteraction between players who don’tknow each other. Even though the gamegives the players a shared forum (Hype)for keeping track of the community’sactivities and a reward system that pro-motes interaction, the players requiresomething more to experience meaning-ful social interaction. This observationpoints to the need for further researchon social interaction in pervasive games.We need to further elaborate on differentsolutions for supporting social interac-tion and to further explore the require-ments and social behaviors of people inpervasive-gaming situations.

One implication of these observationsis that the vision of a “general platformfor social interaction between players”might benefit from being narrowed to acommunication platform tightly cou-pled to the events and actions in thegame (for example, “you can’t send amessage to or talk to the princess beforeyou have beaten the monster and made

it to level 3”). This should cause the gameitself to trigger social interaction.

Although the threefold visionfor pervasive gaming hardlybecame a reality for the usersin our study, it still might be a

good catalyst for developing ideas forfuture pervasive-gaming platforms. Ourfindings related to the three dimensionslead to questions such as these:

• Where do people play the game?• In what situations do people choose

to enter the game?• Do people play alone or when they get

together?• Is there any learning effect (for exam-

ple, do people internalize the SMScommands over time)?

• Does the cost of sending SMS mes-sages create a barrier to long-termplaying of the game?

To address these questions, we plan to usea longitudinal, ethnographically inspiredapproach to further explore the socialand technical dimensions of everyday per-vasive gaming. With such an approachwe hope to address the questions withinpeople’s everyday contexts and environ-ments, thereby offering an understandingof the complex nature of pervasive gam-ing as an everyday activity.

REFERENCES1. G.D. Abowd and E.D. Mynatt, “Charting

Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiq-uitous Computing,” ACM Trans. Com-puter-Human Interaction, vol. 7, no. 1,2000, pp. 29–58.

2. S. Benford, C. Magerkurth, and P. Ljung-strand, “Bridging the Physical and Digitalin Pervasive Gaming,” Comm. ACM, vol.48, no. 3, 2005, pp. 54–57.

3. S. Björk et al., “Designing Ubiquitous Com-puter Games—A Report from a WorkshopExploring Ubiquitous Computing Enter-tainment,” Personal and Ubiquitous Com-

puting, vol. 6, nos. 5–6, 2002, pp. 443–458.

4. A.D. Cheok et al., “Touch-Space: MixedReality Game Space Based on Ubiquitous,Tangible, and Social Computing,” Personaland Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 6, nos.5–6, 2002, pp. 430–442.

5. T. Manninen, “Contextual Virtual Interac-tion as Part of Ubiquitous Game Design andDevelopment,” Personal and UbiquitousComputing, vol. 6, nos. 5–6, 2002, pp.390–406.

6. F. Flintham et al., “Where On-Line Meetson the Streets: Experiences with MobileMixed Reality Games,” CHI Letters, vol.5, no. 1, 2003, pp. 569–576.

7. A.D. Cheok et al., “Human Pacman: AMobile, Wide-Area Entertainment SystemBased on Physical, Social and UbiquitousComputing,” Personal and UbiquitousComputing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 71–81.

8. P. Lankoski et al., “A Case Study in Perva-sive Game Design: The Songs of North,”Proc. 3rd Nordic Conf. Computer-HumanInteraction (NordiCHI 2004), ACM Press,2004, pp. 413–416.

9. P. Thomas and R. Macredie, “Games andthe Design of Human-Computer Inter-

faces,” Educational & Training Technol-ogy Int’l, vol. 31, no. 3, 1994, pp. 134–142.

For more information on this or any other comput-ing topic, please visit our Digital Library at www.computer.org/publications/dlib.

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the AUTHORS

Kalle Jegers is a PhD student in informatics at Umeå University. His research interestsinclude human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, interactive-entertainmentdesign, and computer game design. He received his MS in cognitive science and MAin informatics from Umeå University. Contact him at Umeå Univ., S-90187 Umeå,Sweden; kalle.jegers@informatik.umu.se.

Mikael Wiberg is an associate professor in informatics at Umeå University. His re-search interests include human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, mobilecomputer-supported cooperative work, and interaction design. He received his PhDin informatics from Umeå University. Contact him at Umeå Univ., S-90187 Umeå,Sweden; mikael.wiberg@informatik.umu.se.

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