In this paper, we describe our experiences with location-aware cooperative multiplayer game on public displays. The game world is modelled after the city of Oulu, Finland where players protect the city from a Martian invasion. We investigate the potential of the used platform, the effects of locality and how a more complex and challenging gaming experience on public displays is received. We demonstrate that locality does have a significant effect on the game-play especially when the player can actually see the familiar surroundings in the game world. We also show that while the use of the different services vary a lot from place to place, our game can maintain a very good ranking when compared to other, more casual games.

We report a novel deployment of so-called UBI-hotspots in a city center to establish an ecosystem infrastructure for conducting diverse urban computing research and business in authentic urban setting. We focus on the value network of the hotspots where the commercial use of the hotspots generates revenue for covering their operational expenses. The value network has been validated by a 12-month long operation, during which the hotspots and their services have been available to the general public on 24/7 basis.

In this paper we present a web-based framework for spatiotemporal screen real estate management of interactive public displays. The framework facilitates dynamic partitioning of the screen real estate into virtual screens assigned for multiple concurrent web applications. The framework is utilized in the implementation of so-called UBI-hotspot, which provides various information services via different interaction modalities including mobile. The framework facilitates seamless integration of third party web applications residing anywhere in the public Internet into the UBI-hotspot, thus catering for a scalable and open architecture. We report the deployment of a network of indoor and outdoor UBI-hotspots at downtown Oulu, Finland. The quantitative data on the usage of the UBI-hotspots implicitly speaks in favor of the practical applicability of the framework.