The Context Matters
Patrick Felka, Artur Sterz, Katharina Keller, Bernd Freisleben, Oliver Fast Hinz · 2018
Augmented Reality (AR) is an approach to enrich the real world with additional information. It allows users to interact with virtual objects that are linked to locations in the real world. In the area of mobile computer games, AR is quite demanding for managing resources in communication networks, since in-game points of interest typically lead to high network loads, whereas network utilization is otherwise below the average. Predicting the number of in-game actions of mobile AR games can help to scale the game back-end reasonably without over- or under-provisioning of resources. Context information like weather or available Wi-Fi access points can play a key role in estimating or predicting the number of in-game actions. In this paper, we analyze a comprehensive dataset that contains players' actions of one of the most popular mobile AR games, Ingress. The dataset entails more than 23.9 million player actions over a period of 17 months, as well as additional contextual information. Our analysis shows a highly significant relationship between context factors and in-game actions, which explains large parts of users' behavior in terms of when, where and how often they play the game. By combining four different context factors (i.e., time, user, physical and computing context), our analysis can explain up to 84.44% of the variation in the number of in-game actions.