LAGARTO: A LocAtion based Games AuthoRing TOol enhanced with augmented reality features

Pervasive games represent a new age for both entertainment and interaction by extending the gaming experience out to the physical domain. Nevertheless, developing pervasive games presents challenging issues, since programmers have to cope with high turnover, cheating, heterogeneity of devices and platforms. In this paper, we present LAGARTO, an authoring tool for building location-based mobile games enhanced with augmented reality capabilities. These games are a subclass of pervasive games in which the gameplay progresses according to the location of players. From a literature review and Focus Groups meetings, we have elicited requirements for designing the LAGARTO software architecture. The tool is composed of a web-based application where games are created and managed, and a mobile application in charge of tracking the players. The main objective of our work is to provide a software solution to enable non-programmers users to design, build, and run location-based mobile games. We evaluated the usability of our authoring tool with 28 users (14 software developers and 14 volunteers with no programming skills). This evaluation revealed a good acceptance in terms of easy to use of our solution. Additionally, all users were able to build games, and there was no significant difference between their performance using the tool.