JMingle

JMingle - JMingle, in a nutshell, is a free, open-source, Bluetooth-based, social video game. It dabbles in experimental gameplay as your characters, "Minglets," interact with each other. In an average day, you may pass hundreds of people on your way to work, walking around school, or shopping at the mall. There will be faces in the crowd wherever you look, and in all probability you will never see any of those persons again. The truth is, as your life goes on you will pass hundreds to thousands, maybe millions of people in your lifetime. Have you ever given a moment's thought as to who these people are? It's not on most people's minds. This project seeks to provide a little more personality to those "faces in the crowds" that were previously just ignored. JMingle has a wide range of possibilities. Currently it is a game, where points are scored by finding long-lost friends, and keeping your pet 'minglet' happy by visiting his favorite friends. A second direction is to create a social network based on pairings of devices. You gain "friends" as you bump into them on the street. Then, you can log into a web interface to see the profiles of those you bumped into. JMingle is written in J2ME Java, meaning it should be fairly portable to most Java-enabled phones. JMingle's medium is the Bluetooth protocol. As devices come into range, they are saved and remembered. Any J2ME-enabled device with Bluetooth capabilities ought to be able to run JMingle. It is not limited to just phones. Furthermore, discovered devices don't have to be phones. JMingle does distinguish between devices that use JMingle and those that don't. Devices just have to be discoverable. Features could be added that allow two JMingle clients to do more than just see each other, but no such features have been implemented yet.