Oy is a London buses' inter-stop informal gaming system developed by Andy Huntington:

Oy is a system of between-stop informal gaming, played for small stakes, the price of a text message, or just for fun with fellow passengers onboard. Oyster card holders (London Transport's smart travel card scheme) can sign up in their existing online account to play for top-ups to their card.

Allowing the age of players to be authenticated and payment to be tied into travel costs and systems. A multitude of simple games are played in succession from stop to stop with gaps for other content, creating excitement through the punctuated time frame of travel.

What is also interesting to me is the context-awareness capabilities of the system:

The system also utilises the bus' GPS data, pulling up games that are context specific, responding to the places passing by or live activity in the journey (e.g. the number of passengers to get on at the next stop), giving regular travelers a chance to do some educated guessing.

Technologies used by Oy include: GPS, SMS, odometer data, ticketing data and of course the screens themselves.

Why do I blog this? this seems to be a nice project about context-aware gaming to good be seen as a starting point for more complex interactions. The use of different contextual data and their inclusion in the game play is an appealing attempt to engage players in new types of interactions. In the context of Oy, the use of GPS data allows the system to engage users in site-specific activities, an interesting first life/second life bridge.