The Patrol Task

The ``Patrol task'' is an attempt to test techniques from the laboratory in less constrained environments. Patrol is a game played by MIT students every weekend in a campus building. The participants are divided into teams denoted by colored head bands. Each participant starts with a rubber suction dart gun and a small number of darts. After proceeding to the second floor to ``resurrect'' the teams converge on the basement, mezzanine, and first floors to hunt each other. If shot with a dart, the participant removes his head band, waits for fighting to finish, and proceeds to the second floor before replacing his head band and returning. While there are no formal goals besides shooting members of other teams, some players maintain a ``kill ratio'' of the number of players he shot versus the number of times he was shot. Others emphasize stealth, team play, or holding ``territory.''

Originally, Patrol provided an entertaining way to test the robustness of wearable computing techniques and apparatus for other projects, such as hand tracking for the sign language recognizer [20]. However, it quickly became apparent that the gestures and actions in Patrol provided a relatively well defined language and goal structure in a very harsh ``real-life'' sensing environment. As such, Patrol became a context-sensing project within itself. The next sections discuss current work on determining player location and task using only on-body sensing apparatus.