2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)

InLife ecosystem: creating Serious Games with IoT features

Pavlos Kosmides*, Konstantinos Demestichas, Victor Ortega Lorenzo Mureddu

Evgenia Adamopoulou, Nikos Koutsouris, Ioannis Five Flames Mobile S.L.L Imaginary srl
Loumiotis Valladolid, Spain Milano, Italy
Institute of Communication and Computer Systems
National Technical University of Athens
Zografou – Athens, Greece
e-mail: pkosmidis@cn.ntua.gr

Abstract— Amid the most recent years, gamification has gotten
expanding consideration focusing on an assortment of
individuals including children, students, youngsters and
employers. Likewise, great advances have been also seen in the
Internet-of-Things (IoT) triggering various researchers’
interest. In this paper, the core integration architecture of the
InLife ecosystem that combines IoT with Serious Games is
presented, as well as the user portal that can be used from
third-party developers to create their own Serious Games.
Specifically, the proposed platform focuses on an innovative
gamification framework targeting both typical as well as
special education and social inclusion activities based on
Serious Games. The core concept leverages on the potential of
the IoT paradigm to link closely actions, decisions and events
happening in real-life with in-game educational progress and
modern gaming technologies. This bridge strengthens the
infusion of gamification into non-leisure contexts, boosting at
the same time the creation of new educational methodologies as
well as new business opportunities.
Keywords-Gamification; Serious Games; Internet – of -
Things; sensors; platform
I. INTRODUCTION
Games are changing the way people learn, helping them
think differently, and stimulating new ways in which people
of all ages can use their minds. From empirical studies,
Serious Games have proved to be effective in changing user
behaviour models in real life [1]. Research is showing that
games constitute a more interactive and participatory way to
enable people of all ages better understand almost anything –
from a history lesson to the dramatic change a flood can have
on a specific community. They are increasingly used whether
in formal education or at home, and also for vocational
training. One can use a “virtual world” as a safe environment
to try out certain behaviour and train repeatively that
behaviour until the best approach to reach a certain objective
has been learned. Simulation Serious Games have been
widely used in many different fields, even in military or
medical environments in order to train the behaviour of
learners in specific situations [2].
The realisation of the potential benefits of serious gaming
when used as educational tools in a sound pedagogical or
social inclusion framework has recently started to be
appreciated by the traditional computer gaming industry,
now eager to branch out into new market segments [3].
Certainly, there has been a significant increase in activity
within the research community but also within the enterprise
sectors, with a wide number of companies starting to emerge
in Serious Game market. Indicatively, the serious games
industry was valued at slightly more than $2.5 billion in
2015, and is expected to more than double, reaching almost
$5.5 billion by 2020 [4]. However, any company targeting
the development of non-leisure games faces significant
practical and pedagogical challenges. The most critical issue
is that the modular tools currently available to the gaming
industry are almost exclusively based around leisure-based
gaming and do not support, or cannot be easily integrated,
into educational contexts. Simultaneously, tailoring Serious
Games to specific learning objectives poses a challenge for
educators, as existing Serious Games generally do not allow
easy adaptation of the content to the educators’ own
purposes.
In the proposed ecosystem, the focus is to facilitate the
integration of real-world information into the game world
and validate how this approach helps towards creating
immersive, pervasive Serious Games that can have a
significant impact in their intended educational character
efficacy. This is examined on the basis of the implementation
of a gamification platform and the accompanied
development of Serious Games, in which users can progress
by completing specific tasks in real life, such as switching
off a light when leaving a room or cooperate with other
persons in simple actions, granted monitoring infrastructure
by sensory devices implementing the Internet-of-Things
(IoT) paradigm. InLife ecosystem defines a hierarchical,
multidisciplinary design approach (Fig. 1), bringing together
research and applied expertise from several scientific fields,
including gamification, pedagogical and sociological
approaches, multimedia, computer graphics, human
computer interaction for providing a comprehensive
pervasive gamification development and integration
environment.
The goal of the proposed ecosystem is to demonstrate a
novel, event-driven serious gamification framework for
educational and social inclusion purposes, which directly
links in-game progress and user experience to real-life
actions and decisions, detectable through an IoT
infrastructure. The central novelty of the emergent concept is
that serious gaming will be directly associated to the real
world. The real-life actions will be detected by processing

978-1-5386-7592-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 299

DOI 10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct.2018.00090
information coming from smart environments (smart
metering and smart sensors installations) creating a bridge
between the emerging IoT world on one hand, and Gamified
virtual worlds on the other, enabling a multitude of
educational, motivational and social inclusion applications.
Figure 1. InLife in a nutshell.
It is essential to highlight that the proposed ecosystem is
open and reusable, so that third-parties will also be able to
create and/or configure their own ‘in-life based’ Serious
Games, without having to start from scratch.
In the next sections, a high-level overview of the system
components is presented herein. The rest of this paper is
organized as follows. In Section II, related work is analyzed.
In Section III, the architecture of the proposed ecosystem is
described, while in Section IV the user portal that can be
used by both developers and educators is presented. Finally,
the paper is concluded in Section V.
II. STATE OF THE ART
The proposed ecosystem intersects with several research
areas and industrial sectors including (indicatively): Future
Internet and the Internet of Things, sensor networks,
especially using wireless protocols, gamification and Serious
Games development. In the following sub-sections, we
elaborate on these fields.
A. IoT Management & Control
When building an IoT architecture, one of the major
design choices to be made that affects usability and control is
whether the platform should be local or cloud-enabled. These
two approaches are depicted in Fig. 2 [5].
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Figure 2. Typical IoT Platform architectures (Source: [5]).
In the InLife concept, wireless sensor networks provide a
basis for the IoT layer. Because sensors are a major input to
the overall system, it is highly important that versatile,
proven and effective technologies are used for the
communication of sensor measurements. Two of the most
popular wireless connectivity protocols deployed in this
context are Zigbee [6] and Bluetooth Low Energy [7].
Sensors provide the required inputs to the system that can
be used to detect events or confirm events registered into the
system manually by the users, in order to ensure that users
are fair. This concept suggests a tight integration of user
sourced information and sensor-based data. A simple
example for this would be a kindergarten where the teacher
asks the children not to make a lot of noise. Wireless sensors
placed in the facility could monitor noise levels created by
the children and objectively give feedback to them and the
teacher in a game-like manner. This approach to enforcing
the desired behaviour would be not only effective, but also
entertaining for children, which would act collectively in
order to achieve a certain group goal. IoT research and
technology currently available present a solid basis for InLife
to build upon, allowing us to create successful value-added
services for IoT platforms.
B. Using Serious Games concepts to influence behavior
change
Gaming started out as a branch of children’s play.
Throughout history, children’s games have brought up
generations and have been widely recognized as a vital
aspect of the development of one’s personality, social skills,
knowledge and other characteristics. However, playing
games has not always been considered an educational
activity and in the past was predominantly focused on young
people as opposed to adults. This has changed in the recent
past, where the concept of “serious games” was introduced.
Serious games started out as a concept focused on [8]
education through experimenting and investigation, having
entertainment as a secondary purpose. Board and card games
are two examples of serious games which have been around
long before the introduction of electronic games.
One of the greatest challenges in the creation of serious
games is to find the right proportions between efficacy and
pleasure. A game of this kind should be effective in building
skills, knowledge and competences for its players, while at
the same time providing an acceptable but not excessive
reward level. The effectiveness of such games has been
proven [9] in the domain of industrial and military role-
playing training games, and they have recently made their
way into the educational domain. The success of serious
games in education is based on some fundamental and
inherent characteristics they possess; they are well-
structured, highly motivational, they have a well-defined set
of rules that are accepted by all participants etc. Of course,
one of the most important aspects of serious games is the
gameplay, which is what keeps the players interested in it. It
should therefore be able to adapt to each participant’s
interest and time they spent playing the game, providing the
necessary rewards, just as a traditional game would do. The
importance of game design is further analysed below.
Behaviour modification, also known as applied behaviour
analysis (ABA), refers to empirically derived techniques
designed to influence the occurrence or frequency of certain
behaviours. The research of behaviour modification dates
back to 1911, when E. Thorndike frequently mentioned
“modifying behaviour” in his article Provisional Laws of
Acquired Behaviour. Since 1940s and 1950s, J. Wolpe [10]
had adopted this term to describe psychotherapeutic
techniques derived from empirical research. Common
methods used in behaviour modification include increasing
the adaptive behaviour through reinforcement, and
decreasing the maladaptive one through techniques such as
extinction, punishment or satiation, with emphasis on
reinforcement measures.
In contrast to behaviour modification that imposes or
removes stimuli to affect a behavioural change, gamification
attempts to achieve the same result by creating an
entertaining and engaging experience using the elements of a
game or contest [11].
According to [12], gamification has four major elements
that significantly increase its acceptance: increase of user
satisfaction, conveyance of optimism, facilitation of social
interaction and provision of meaning. In this way, compared
to traditional behaviour modification methods (such as
punishment), gamification relates behavioural or habit
change to positive emotional feedback. InLife ecosystem
exploits gamification as a “technology” which aims to create
entertaining experiences while accomplishing serious
personal, social, or business goals. Gamification usually
includes game elements such as leader board, rankings and
points system, to create entertaining and engaging
experiences. In addition, InLife ecosystem uses advanced
artificial intelligence algorithms based on ant-colony
optimization in order to adjust the players’ rewards based on
their actions.
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Fig. 3 displays a high-level diagram of the architecture,
containing all the components described in the sections that
follow. This diagram also depicts the actual deployment
approach of the components.
x A2 - Authorization and authentication component: This
component plays a key role in the whole infrastructure,
since it represents the single sign on module that
provides to the users a unique login experience while
301
keeping the communication between all the
components secure using OAuth2 [13] tokens
exchange.
x User profile database: This component is responsible
for storing users’ profile data by extending the basic
user's data set provided by the A2 component.
Specifically, the A2 user's data set will be extended to
allow users, once logged in toward the A2 single sign
on component, to fill or update their profile, providing
a set of personal data such as the avatar thumbnail or
other personal data that will compose the personal
profile.
x Game configuration engine: This component represents
the core of the game backend logic. It allows InLife
game developers to create a configuration file that,
once uploaded to the Game Configuration Engine
system, will automatically generate a web configuration
console for game designers and educators to let them
personalize the game mechanics, objectives, levels of
difficulty and scope of the game play. The work of
game developers and educators is split into a game
configuration pipeline (see picture below) where each
actor of the InLife games creation need to access and
work on it at different times.
x Learning Analytics: This component represents another
example of reuse and exploitation of a module
developed within the context of the EU H2020 RAGE
Project [14] aimed to collect, analyze and visualize data
obtained from in-games and real-life activities within
the InLife ecosystem, with purposes such as revealing
players' progress and how they actually act and learn
while playing games and at the same time providing all
this information to educators and stakeholders.
x IoT component: This component is responsible to
integrate the IoT paradigm into the InLife framework.
The IoT component aims to deliver a flexible and
scalable data and resource management framework
guaranteeing consistency, security, and reliability in the
development of gaming-driven, smart IoT applications.
In InLife, the IoT component is implemented as a cloud
solution, where the sensing devices expose application-
agnostic elementary functionality and the application
logic is entirely deployed in the cloud environment.
Leveraging on the provided services, it is possible for a
serious game hosted and/or developed by the InLife
platform to merge versatile application logic into its
game play and mechanics on top of the conditions and
players’ actions taking place in the physical
environment.
x Incentive server component: This component is
responsible of computing rewards for players in order
to incentivize them to meet the Educator’s training
goals. It uses intensive machine learning techniques and
artificial intelligence (AI) principles in order to choose
the best reward to incentivize the players. An
Educator’s goal could be as an example that players
have an energy consumption responsible behavior. The
Educator will more precisely explain how to reach this
 Figure 3. InLife ecosystem Open Architecture.
objectives: perhaps he wants players accomplished
actions in a balance way and avoid that a player
accomplishes all the time the same action or perhaps
the Educator wants players get a minimum number of
points each days.
A thorough analysis of the User Portal is presented in the
following Section.
IV. USER PORTAL
This component is in charge for the management of the
different stakeholders that can interact with the InLife
ecosystem with different roles. User portal allows managing
user, roles, games and components that are available to build
games using the InLife SDK and acts also as a showcase for
the games and plugins developed inside InLife ecosystem.
The main objectives of the user portal are:
x be the main marketing tool for the InLife project to
raise awareness in stakeholders belonging to different
market segments
x be the main entry point for developers that want to user
InLife tools to create serious games
x build a community for games, plugins and themes
developers that generates a collaborative environment.
x acts as a marketplace to share components, plugins,
themes and games developed with the InLife tools.
A. Role in the Architecture
The role of this component in the architecture is mainly
for dissemination and marketing purposes providing links to
the ecosystem of games and tools developed by the InLife
community. It represents the main tool to publish InLife
tools and to attract developers to the InLife ecosystem. It
also collects KPIs and metrics regarding how many games
are available and how many users are linked to the InLife
ecosystem as simple registered users or as active players.
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B. Home Screen
This is the main screen from which you can access the
rest of the functionalities and which shows the main
information of the portal in a summarized way to allow you
to see all the contents at a glance (Fig. 4).
From the top menu, we can access each of the main
sections of the portal: Games, Assets, Forum or Login, our
shopping cart or the portal content search engine.
Below is the header of the portal with different
promotion images that show the new characteristics of the
portal.
Then a grid with the latest games and content displayed
on the portal is shown, a small top menu allows us to switch
between the latest and most popular or free contents for
example. For each of the contents, an advertising image is
shown, the name of the content and the author, the
publication date and the price if any.
Finally, we have the link to download the platform SDK
as well as access to the necessary help information for its
use.
C. User Registration from Login Screen
Login and registration screens to access or create if
necessary our profile in the portal. The process has been
designed to be as simple and quick as possible, without large
information requirements that make the process longer than
necessary.
To register, you only need the user's email address, your
username, an identification name and password, allowing in
any case the automatic registration through external accounts
already existing in Google or Facebook (Fig. 5). Once the
user has registered, you will receive a confirmation email in
order to validate the account.
The login screen will allow the user to enter the platform
by entering their email and password or through the
associated Google or Facebook account (Fig. 6). In this way,
the user will have access to all its contents, purchases made,
content uploaded, etc.

Figure 5. User portal - Registration form.

Figure 6. User portal - Login form.

D. New Game Registration Form

This form allows users registered in the portal to upload
content (games, themes, plugins) so that they can be
accessed by other users (Fig. 7).
The data needed to register a content are:
x Name of the content
x Content type (Game, Theme, plugin)
x Version of the uploaded content
x Brief description of the content, what it does, what it is
used for, how it can be used....
x Price of the content, which can be 0 if it is free.
x The file with the required assets.
x Two promotional images, of different sizes and
proportions.
x Screenshot of the content

Figure 4. User portal - Home Screen.

Figure 7. User portal - Add content.

Finally, before uploading any type of content, the user

must accept the terms of use and privacy policy provided by
the portal, checking the appropriate checkbox

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 V. CONCLUSION
To summarize, the present paper presented the work
conducted within the InLife project, which focuses on taking [4]
advantage of IoT technology and combine it with Serious
Games. The core architecture was presented, as well as a
user portal used by developers and educators. The realization
of the InLife vision will ultimately pave the way for the [5]
proliferation of new innovative IoT-based serious games,
created also by third parties, featuring enhanced gameplays [6]
and educational efficacy, thus establishing new market
opportunities for involved stakeholders. [7]
ACKNOWLEDGMENT [8]
This work has been perfomed under the H2020 732184 [9]
project InLife, which has received funding from the
European Community’s Horizon 2020 Programme. This [10]
paper reflects only the authors’ view, and the Community is
[11]
not liable to any use that may be made of the information
contained therein.
[12]
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