Yesterday I gave a talk in Lyon for the video game/mobile game industry about the "near futures of digital entertainment". Slide are available here (english) and ici (en français).

The talk started by a quick overview of research projects about mobile/pervasive gaming (location-based games, mobile tagging, etc) showing how this is difficult to throw to the markets (hardware/software issues + infrastructure problems...). I then tried to show some hints about what to do with examples that I find interesting and very down-to-earth: using the phone microphone, tv-phone tie in, etc. The point was to show people from the industry that they can do something almost overnight, not using ultra-tech fancy GPS solutions and stuff.

I concluded the talk with a mapping of the possibilities (in the form of an uncertainty cone):

The horizontal line shows the consumer market. When circles/things are close to the edges, it means that it’s not certain to be around before few years? The problem is to find what can turned them into more market-orientated products. For example, a way to bring location-based games closer to the market would be to forget the use of GPS but to let people self-disclose their locations.