Can You See Me Now?

Can You See Me Now? (abbreviated CYSMN in its research papers) is a location-based game of chase and touring artwork by the British artists' group Blast Theory, made in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. Online players move avatars through a virtual model of a city while Blast Theory "runners", carrying handheld computers with GPS receivers and Wi-Fi connections, chase them through the real streets of the same city. The work premiered at the b.tv festival in Sheffield on 30 November and 1 December 2001 and won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica.

The researchers who built the game described it as a "mobile mixed reality game", and their human-computer interaction studies of its public stagings, published at the CHI conference, in IEEE Pervasive Computing and in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, examined how players and performers dealt with unreliable GPS positioning and wireless networking. It toured cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas until 2010, and in 2024 Blast Theory rebuilt it as a smartphone app for iOS and Android after a Kickstarter campaign.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked all facts, quotes and figures against the cited Blast Theory, Ars Electronica, MRL, In Certain Places, John Sear, Wired and Leonardo pages, the 2002 report, the CHI 2004 and TOCHI 2006 papers, and Crossref metadata for every DOI. About review dates.

Gameplay

An online player begins on the game's website by entering a name for themselves and then answering the question "Is there someone you haven't seen for a long time that you still think of?" with a second name. Players then join a queue and are dropped into a virtual model of the host city at one of several start positions. They move with the arrow keys, cannot enter solid buildings or leave the game zone, and must avoid the runners. If a runner comes within five virtual metres of a player, the player is "seen" (the designers deliberately chose this word over "caught") and leaves the game; the player's score is the time they survived. At that moment the runner announces the catch over the audio feed using the name of the absent person the player gave at registration, and photographs the physical spot where the player was seen.

Online players can exchange public text messages, which also appear on the runners' handheld screens, and they hear a single live audio stream mixing all of the runners' walkie-talkie talk. Blast Theory writes that this stream lets players hear the runners "getting lost, cold and out of breath on the streets of the city". In the version studied in the 2006 paper, the virtual model showed street layout and outline buildings without textures, traffic or pedestrians; players appeared as running avatars labelled with their names, runners were marked with a red sphere, and a tethered bird's-eye camera followed each player. After the game, players could visit an archive website to see game statistics and download the runners' sighting photographs, each placed on the 3D model where it was taken.

Blast Theory's description of the work says that the physical city is overlaid with a virtual city "to explore ideas of absence and presence". The group's 2003 artists' note lists five levels at which proximity and distance exist in the game, ending with the runners' photographs: "Each player is forever linked to this anonymous square of the cityscape."

Technology

The Mixed Reality Lab states that the game was built in the Equator project on the EQUIP architecture, with performers using handheld computers, GPS and walkie-talkies. Equator was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); the 2006 paper also credits the Arts and Humanities Research Board, Arts Council England and the V2 Organization for support.

For the 2001 Sheffield staging, players downloaded a Macromedia Shockwave web client. A Fuselight multi-user server hosted at Nottingham limited the game to twenty simultaneous players, and the main game server, written in Macromedia Director, ran in a temporary control room in Sheffield. Each runner's handheld (a Compaq iPAQ, according to the 2002 report) sent GPS position updates over an 802.11b network to a proxy server, which converted latitude and longitude into metric coordinates relative to a known reference point in the city.

The 2006 account describes the runners' interface running on an HP Jornada handheld computer connected over Wi-Fi, with a GPS receiver plugged into its serial port. In Sheffield the equipment was mounted on a wooden board inside a waterproof plastic bag; later versions built it into a jacket. The runner's screen could zoom between a view of the whole game zone and a local view, and showed the receiver's own estimate of GPS error, the network signal strength and the number of players online. Runners wore earpieces and head-mounted microphones for their walkie-talkies, used a separate technical channel to the control room that players could not hear, and carried digital cameras for the sighting photographs. A crew of three ran the server and supported the runners from a control room inside the game zone.

Neither positioning nor networking was reliable. In Sheffield, with Garmin eTrex receivers, the GPS error reported by the receivers ranged from 4 m to 106 m with a mean of 12.4 m. In Rotterdam the team switched to differential GPS with Trimble Lassen LP receivers and Sarantel antennas and ignored satellites less than 15 degrees above the horizon; reported error ranged from 1 m to 384 m with a mean of 4.4 m. Wi-Fi coverage was only partial in both cities, even with an 8 m rooftop mast and two omnidirectional antennas in Sheffield and seven access points in Rotterdam (four on buildings, one on a lamppost, one in a van and one on a ship). The typical delay between one participant acting and another seeing it was six seconds or more. To hide obvious errors, the game server moved any runner whose GPS position fell inside a building or in water to the nearest valid point on the street.

History

Commission and premiere

Can You See Me Now? was Blast Theory's second major collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab, after Desert Rain, and grew out of a period of research and development in London and Nottingham on GPS and wireless networking. It was commissioned in 2001 for Shooting Live Artists, an initiative of Arts Council England, BBC Online and b.tv/The Culture Company. Blast Theory credits Steve Benford, Martin Flintham and Rob Anastasi of the Lab with particularly significant contributions.

The first staging, at the b.tv festival in Sheffield, was live for 6.5 hours over Friday 30 November and Saturday 1 December 2001, with three runners from Blast Theory covering an area of the city roughly half a mile square. According to the researchers' 2002 report, 214 players took part over the Internet: 135 were caught, 76 logged off and 3 were never caught. The longest survival time was 50 minutes and the shortest 13 seconds. In this first version the virtual city was a flat map with players shown as simple icons; later versions used a 3D model with running avatars.

Touring

By the time of the 2006 study the game used four professional performers as runners and limited the online game to fifteen simultaneous players to keep network traffic down, and a typical session lasted about two hours. Blast Theory's own description gives up to 100 people playing online at a time. The model used in Rotterdam included wire-frame versions of several buildings that existed only as plans. Blast Theory lists the following presentations of the game (documentation screenings, special events and a 2006 installation in New York are listed separately and omitted here):

Year	City	Venue or event
2001	Sheffield	b.tv festival (premiere)
2003	Rotterdam	Dutch Electronic Arts Festival
2003	Oldenburg	Edith Russ Site for Media Art
2004	Cologne	DAMPF, International Festival for Dance, Performance, Media Art
2004	Brighton	Gardner Arts Centre
2004	Barcelona	ArtFutura
2005	Cambridge	The Junction
2005	Cardiff	May You Live In Interesting Times, Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology, National Museum of Wales
2005	Tokyo	InterCommunication Center (ICC)
2006	Chicago	Museum of Contemporary Art
2006	Banff	Banff New Media Centre
2007	Preston	In Certain Places
2007	Dublin	We Are Here 2.0
2007	Austria	Donau Festival
2007	Denmark	Machine-RAUM
2007	Amsterdam	Picnic Festival
2008	Belo Horizonte	Arte.Mov festival
2009	Madrid	ARCO
2010	London	Tate Late, Tate Britain

During the 2003 Ars Electronica festival the work was shown at the OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich in Linz from 6 to 11 September. The Preston staging ran over two days in July 2007, with public terminals in the Guild Hall shopping arcade and city-centre cafes and online players joining from as far away as Brazil and Saudi Arabia; the organisers state that the Preston version drew more hits than the game had ever received.

2024 app version

In April 2024 Blast Theory launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £20,000 towards the cost of redeveloping the game from scratch as an iOS and Android app, noting that its original technology (handheld GPS receivers) had become obsolete more than a decade earlier. Backer rewards included, for the first time, the chance to play as a runner. Blast Theory states that the 2024 redevelopment was supported by 164 Kickstarter backers. Developer John Sear writes that the new version is a Unity app, replacing the original Shockwave client, that uses Photon Fusion and Photon Voice for multiplayer and voice, stores photos and logs on Amazon Web Services, and handles the runner, player and controller roles in a single app. The rebuilt game premiered at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) with free sessions from 19 to 21 November 2024. Its 3D world was based on the courtyards and buildings of the campus around ACCA; players could take part through the app from anywhere, while runners chased them in person across the campus.

Research

The Mixed Reality Lab and Blast Theory published several studies of the game. A 2002 report evaluated the Sheffield premiere through ethnography, discussions with participants and system logs, and identified issues such as runner and player tactics, players' need for local knowledge, the role of audio, and the design of entry into and exit from the game. Flintham and colleagues presented the game at the CHI 2003 conference in a paper on mobile mixed reality games that joined online and street players. A CHI 2004 paper by Crabtree and colleagues used ethnographic study of the runners to argue that orchestration of such a game extends beyond the control room to the performers on the street, and proposed interfaces to support troubleshooting when participants are disconnected or cannot get a GPS fix.

The fullest account appeared in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction in 2006, drawing on video, field notes and system logs from the Sheffield and Rotterdam stagings. It found that online players were mostly unaware of the GPS and Wi-Fi problems, partly because no player had a global view and because the walkie-talkie channel kept working when Wi-Fi dropped; runners deliberately talked more while disconnected to keep the game going. When players did notice runners jumping or appearing from nowhere, some treated it as a fault, others built it into the fiction (one accused a runner of using an "invisible coat"), and some exploited it by hiding behind buildings in areas of poor GPS coverage. In one recorded exchange after a game, a runner described waiting until players headed for "a big open space, with good GPS coverage" before closing in.

From these observations the authors argued that designers should treat uncertainty as a basic property of location-based experiences rather than a bug to be fixed later. They proposed four states for a mobile participant (connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, neither connected nor tracked) and five strategies for dealing with uncertainty: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it and exploit it. An earlier article by the same group in IEEE Pervasive Computing (2003) had already examined the causes of uncertainty in the game, including GPS, and strategies for dealing with it. The paper related the exploit strategy to the idea of "seamful design" proposed by Chalmers and Galani in 2004, in which designers deliberately use the gaps in a technology's coverage.

The 2006 paper also contrasted the game's structure with augmented reality. Because online players and runners occupy separate worlds connected only virtually, the authors called it "an adjacent reality rather than an augmented reality, which in its ideal tries to seamlessly connect one world to another", and suggested that this separation, together with the "fuzzier" sense of location given by the audio stream, hid some of the worst effects of positioning error. The paper named Uncle Roy All Around You, a later Blast Theory and Mixed Reality Lab work in which street and online players cooperate to find a mysterious figure, as a continuation of this research.

Reception and legacy

Besides the 2003 Golden Nica, the work was nominated for a BAFTA in Interactive Arts. The Ars Electronica festival described it as "a game in which reality and virtuality, presence and absence overlap". In a 2003 Wired News interview with Blast Theory's Matt Adams, the interviewer described it as the first of the group's "wireless-world games"; Adams said that remote players reported a strong physical and emotional reaction when they heard runners closing in on them. In the same interview he said that Uncle Roy All Around You had dropped GPS in favour of players declaring their own location, because GPS was "too flaky".

In their 2006 essay "Beyond Locative Media" in Leonardo, Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis placed Can You See Me Now?, with Uncle Roy All Around You and I Like Frank, among Blast Theory projects that used location-aware mobile mapping devices to coordinate audience and performers in real and virtual space. Blast Theory notes that VICE has cited the game as a forerunner of Pokémon Go.

See also

• Uncle Roy All Around You
• Mixed reality
• Augmented reality
• Pokémon Go