Backseat Virtual Reality

From Newscientist a game that uses passing scenery to provide a base for a game. A nice idea of borrowing or augmenting reality to provide richness for a game experience:

" ... Researchers at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, are testing an in-car gaming system that allows passengers to play an interactive game based on the buildings, forests, and rivers passed along a route while driving. The Backseat Playground uses such landmarks encountered during a trip to build a story, complete with in-game characters and events. The game matches sights for events in an adventure that might involve a murder mystery or a werewolf thriller, and makes use of a GPS receiver to provide geographical data, a handheld computer for player interaction as the story builds, and headphones for players to listen to phone calls and walkie-talkie messages from in-game characters. A laptop in the trunk, which correctly positions the car in the virtual world, connects the GPS receiver, handheld computer, and headphones. "We are trying to suggest spaces and places and events and have the user fill in the gaps to build a narrative," explains John Bichard, who developed the interactive game with colleagues Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin. The computer scientists are considering integrating voice recognition into the game, which would allow players to talk directly to the characters. Rob Aspin, with the Center for Virtual Environments at Britain's University of Salford is intrigued by the way in which content is delivered for the game. "It can create a high sense of presence and interaction while hiding most of the technology from the user," says Aspin ..."