Software companies need capabilities to evaluate the user value and the success of their products. This is especially crucial for highly competitive markets, such as the mobile game industry, where thousands of new games are introduced every month. Game companies often run continuous experiments as an integrated part of the overall development process. This paper presents a game company's journey on experimentation, and describes how the experiments are used at different stages of the development cycle to produce reliable, meaningful data for developers as well as how to balance between different data collection methods. Our study indicates that experiments are important in all stages of the development in different forms. Early stages in the development experiments can be run with proxy users due to lack of real users, whereas later in the development Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics play the most important role in experiments. Establishing concrete goals for the experiments, balancing between qualitative and quantitative data collection, experimentation throughout the development process with the guidance of an efficient leadership appears to be the key to success.

In this paper we introduce prerequisites for the empowerment of social interaction when using a multi-user mobile service. The paper is based on a case study of user experiences of a multiplayer mobile game where the players attend the game via their mobile phones whilst their activity is materialized on a common public display. Based on the results of user evaluation we introduce three enabling factors for social interaction in a multiplayer game: context, communication and identification. User aspects to these factors as well as perspectives to other types of services are presented.

A person may use many devices capable of rendering digital content on a regular basis. For instance, the user is in front of a large TV screen, and soon he or she moves away from the TV and wants to continue the media consumption. The transfer of media content across devices needs to be handled seamlessly. In this paper, we present a phone-centric approach to improve the end-user experience in multi-device ecosystem. Together with predefined parameters, we use context information to trigger content adaptation, and generate decisions relating to the transcoding operation. We have made a preliminary UI evaluation of the system, and the system was found to be useful, although requiring fine tuning and further development.

This paper describes a new method for image corner detection based on the curvature scale space (CSS) representation. The first step is to extract edges from the original image using a Canny detector. The corner points of an image are defined as points where image edges have their maxima of absolute curvature. The corner points are detected at a high scale of the CSS image and the locations are tracked through multiple lower scales to improve localization. The CSS corner detector is very robust to noise and performed better than three other detectors it was compared to.

This paper describes a novel method for image corner detection based on the curvature scale-space (CSS) representation. The first step is to extract edges from the original image using a Canny detector (1986). The corner points of an image are defined as points where image edges have their maxima of absolute curvature. The corner points are detected at a high scale of the CSS and tracked through multiple lower scales to improve localization. This method is very robust to noise, and we believe that it performs better than the existing corner detectors An improvement to Canny edge detector's response to 45/spl deg/ and 135/spl deg/ edges is also proposed. Furthermore, the CSS detector can provide additional point features (curvature zero-crossings of image edge contours) in addition to the traditional corners.