21 March 2009

Nokia's Innovation Guru Talks About
Innovations And The Future Of Mobile Games

Dr. Mark Ollila, Nokia’s Director of Technology & Strategy and Head of Nokia Games

Dr. Mark Ollila, Director of Technology & Strategy and Nokia Games Publishing, Services and Software, talks for the Pocket Gamer about location based gaming, augmented reality and innovations that Nokia expects to see in the mobile games industry in the near future and endless possibilities of mobile technologies.

Dr. Mark Ollila, sat down with Pocket Gamer's Stuart Dredge to discuss some questions about the mobile games space, things that going well in mobile gaming, and some of the challenges that remains.

As one of the world leaders in mobile technology with its N-series products, Nokia is poised to be among the major influencers of the space over the next several years.

Next week at Game Developers Conference 2009, some of these exciting new technologies wil be shown off at Nokia's booth. It includes Nokia Image Space -a totally new concept in viewing images that offers a new way to explore and share photos and create some kind of mirror world full of digital content. Users can experience places and collaborate in a novel fashion. The mash-up architecture enables creative development and adoption of Image Space.

"On the publishing side, a lot of our game playability and usability testing methods come from NRC," he says.

"Within the games publishing team, our remit is to push the N-Gage platform to the limit and share best practices with the industry, trying these new ideas and concepts out and sharing the knowledge."

Something like Image Space fits neatly into this - Nokia's N-Gage execs have been talking openly about incorporating location, mapping and presence into games for a while now, not to mention user-generated content.

"It's fascinating to look at rewarding and sharing that content, tying in the location aspects and figuring out how you can bring it into a game," says Ollila.

"We're generating hundreds and hundreds of concepts at the moment internally, going through our innovation process. We're looking for location-orientated ideas, or around people and communities, or showcasing the platform's capabilities, or stuff that is more cross-service orientated."

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