Final Idea and Justification

"Beacon is a web application that brings an exciting twist to locating friends and family around the city."

Beacon is an iPhone application developed using the iWebKit web-application framework. Due to Beacon being a web-application, rather than a native, Objective-C / Cocoa-based application, there is opportunity for Beacon to be ported to other smartphone platforms with ease.

Beacon uses secure Twitter OAuth authentication to allow users to log in using a familiar service rather than taking the time and effort to create a Beacon-specific user account. Once a user logs in, they are able to choose to either:


(a) Join a current game, as a Hider, or
(b) Host a new beacon game as a Seeker.

The objective of the finder is simply to find the other players, they can do this by sending the players a message over twitter asking them for their location. The players can then choose to either tell the finder their location in a message or send them a photo. The photo will come from a cache of pre taken photos and only show a small snapshot of an area near to where the hider is, such as half of the logo of a shop front. The game uses geo location to show where the hiders and finders are in relation to each other and makes sure that the hider has the correct photos available to them when they want to send one.

Once the finder gets close to one of the hiders they can send blips to hiders phone so their phone makes a noise. This will help the finder to get to the hider as geo location does not allow us to pin point their direct location as the lcoation is too small and the hiders will be too close together.

Our game has multiple functions. It can be used to simply find your friends or family when out shopping just by signing into twitter and sending messages to each other. The other function is the game where the photos can be sent and players are hiders and finders. We chose to do a game like this as we thought it would be more popular and multifunctional.

Game Justification:

The game concept we decided on was hide and seek. Although not a traditional 'board game' it is definitely a childhood game that brings people together and matches the original idea that we had, that the whole idea of a board game is to bring the family together. Our idea does this in two different ways, as a game and in a practical way. We have also incorporated the idea of the battle ship layout into our game with the interface that shows a multistory layout of the shopping centre, or the location that they are playing the game in.

Research Influence:

The research we have done has been very influential in the way we have designed and done the layout for our application. We chose to use iWebKit over jQTouch as the software is specially designed to create apps for the iPhone and this is the specific platform we have chosen to create our application on. The application also runs quicker on the computers and on the iPhone making it easier to upload and test. The jQTouch interface is known to have problems with the screen displays making it jumpy and delayed and we want our application to run smoothly.  

The other research we did gave us a lot of information and advice about designing the user interface. We chose to make our user interface look very similar to other general iPhone applications to keep continuity. This will make our application easier to use especially with older users as the interface will be instantly familiar to them. The buttons will all be the same with text written on them to make them instantly obvious to the user what they do so the user will be able to pick up the way the application works almost instantly. The buttons are clearly spaced out which limits accidental pressing and they have text written on them to make them clear and easy to use.

We want to make the application do exactly what it says so we need to limit the amount of log in screens and options the user is faced with as we have a limited time to engage the user before they get bored and move on from the app. We will try and make the game nearly instantly playable for the user, with only a log in to twitter needed.

We have designed the application to be playable on the go, its for use when a group are out and about in a certain area and want to find each other or play the game. Users don't need to allocate a large amount of time to play the application, they can use it within minutes if they simply want to find their friends. Hopefully this will make the application more playable as users will keep wanting to go back to use it.