Operation Times Square is an urban game and a large-scale experiment on mobile sensing. The game will bridge global and local, physical and virtual worlds through a novel combination of an asynchronous web site-based access, GSM-based locationing and camera-phone based player inputs.

There are three views to the game: a custom mobile client for S60, an asynchronous web-site and a public large display in Times Square, NYC. Correspondingly, there are three groups of participants, with decreasing involvement: some 200 students creating stories in Manhattan while exploring the city, Web site visitors and audience in front of the public display in Times Square.

The game is about creating stories in a collaborative fashion. The stories emerge as images are taken by the urban players with their mobile phones in various locations simultaneously.  The pictures need to correspond to keywords that are dispatched to the players by the web community in real time. The meaningful, but unpredictable stories are shown on a large screen in Times Square. The stories are about something that every person can naturally relate to living in a large city: maybe about food, restaurant experiences, entertainment, getting a taxi or commuting, etc. Since the game is based on GSM locationing, the local players in Manhattan are lured to produce a unique view to the themes proposed by the keywords.

The players are let to have their own imaginative handprints both on the collaborative emergent story and on the public display. The players are hooked in the game by combining the previous with a live engaging stream of alien messages or tasks from the Web, assigned personally to them. On the top of this, there is a scoring mechanism that motivates each player to beat her competitors by contributing more and more imaginative content to the stories.

The game is implemented by SensorPlanet, an initiative of Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland, on mobile device centric large scale sensory networks.