How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we interact across digital, material, and social landscapes. We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill—waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson examine how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives. They show that as mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a digitally saturated world. Mobile games become conduits for what the authors call ambient play, pervading much of our social and communicative terrain. We become digital wayfarers, moving constantly among digital, social, and social worlds. Hjorth and Richardson explore how households are transformed by media—how idiosyncratic media use can alter the spatial composition and emotional cadence of the home. They show how mobile games connect domestic forms of play with more public forms of playfulness in urban spaces, how collaborative play (both networked and face-to-face) is incorporated into private and public play, and how touchscreens and haptic play emphasize the perception of the moving body. Hjorth and Richardson invite us to think of mobile gaming as more than a “casual” distraction but as a complex cultural practice embedded into our contemporary ways of being, knowing, and communicating.

An engaging look at how mobile games are increasingly part of our day-to-day lives and the ways that we interact across real as well as digital landscapes. We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill--waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson examine how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives. They show that as mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a digitally saturated world. We are digital wayfarers, moving constantly among digital, social, and social worlds.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the third International Joint Conference an Ambient Intelligence, AmI 2012, held in Pisa, Italy, in November 2012. The 18 revised full papers and 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 (full papers) respectively 14 (short papers) submissions. From a scientific point of view, the papers make a multidisciplinary approach covering fields like computer science, human computer interaction, electrical engineering, industrial design, behavioral sciences, aimed at enriching physical environments with a network of distributed devices, such as sensors, actuators, and computational resources, in order to support users in their everyday activities. From a technological perspective the volume represents the convergence of recent achievements in ubiquitous and communication technologies, pervasive computing, intelligent user interfaces and artificial intelligence.

Modern day and technology-rich environments require a reconceptualization of how the nature of technology influences urban areas. Rethinking the way we apply these technologies will not only alter the way people communicate and interact, but it will also alter how individuals learn and explore the world around them. Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities offers insights about the ambient in 21st century smart cities, learning cities, responsive cities, and future cities, and highlights the importance of people as critical to the urban fabric of smart cities that are increasingly embedded with pervasive and often invisible technologies. The book, based on an urban research study, explores urbanity from multiple perspectives ranging from the cultural to the geographic. While highlighting topics including digital literacies, smarter governance, and information architectures, this book is ideally designed for students, educators, researchers, the business community, city government staff and officials, urban practitioners, and those concerned with contemporary and emerging complex urban challenges and opportunities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference of Ambient Intelligence, AmI 2014, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in November 2014. The 21 revised full papers presented together with 5 short papers and 4 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized along a set of thematic tracks: ambient assisted living; internet of things; ambient play and learning; smart buildings and cities; intelligent driving; data science; smart healthcare and healing environments; ambient persuasion; and new and emerging themes.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the AmI 2011 Workshops, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2011. The 55 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on aesthetic intelligence: designing smart and beautiful architectural spaces; ambient intelligence in future lighting systems; interactive human behavior analysis in open or public spaces; user interaction methods for elderly, people with dementia; empowering and integrating senior citizens with virtual coaching; integration of AMI and AAL platforms in the future internet (FI) platform initiative; ambient gaming; human behavior understanding: inducing behavioral change; privacy, trust and interaction in the internet of things; doctoral colloquium.

The topic of urban life and the ambient in smart cities, learning cities, and future cities is a timely one, fitting as it does in the world today by responding in an interdisciplinary way across many areas of research and practice. It is essential for researchers to think about and engage with the notion of flourishing in increasingly challenging environments in smarter ways. Urban Life and the Ambient in Smart Cities, Learning Cities, and Future Cities expands upon explorations of urban life to the ambient. As such, perspectives are offered in this work on urban life in the context of smart cities, learning cities, and future cities, enriched by understandings of the ambient, infusing the interactions of people and technologies in 21st-century environments with increased awareness, at the moment. Covering topics such as ambient learning, smart homes, and extended realities, this premier reference work is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, architects, urban planners, instructional designers, sociologists, city officials, community leaders, librarians, researchers, and academicians.