Mara G. da Silva
Virginia Tech
2008
Desktop gaming interaction is mostly limited to keyboard and mouse. This is a formative study to investigated the benefits of adding body-based interaction to desktop game.
This project was part of my research topic as a graduate student at Virginia Tech. It was done under the guidance and supervision of Dr. Doug Bowman.
I implemented two body-based interaction techniques as additional input interaction for the game World of Warcraft: leaning, and foot pedal.
Leaning – By leaning the user controls in-game navigation. Starting from a neutral body position, when the user leans slightly forward their character walks forward. By leaning further forward the character will run forward. Leaning to the side rotates the character by an angle proportional to the distance that the user leaned.
Foot pedal – To avoid fatigue from having to hold the neutral body position, and to avoid accidental movements, the foot pedal is used to enable and disable movement.
Rulers are added to the side and bottom of the game interface to provided visual feedback on how far players moved their bodies in relation to the neutral position, as shown in Figure 2
A Wii remote is placed above the user. It’s infrared camera points down, tracking the infrared LEDs place on a headband. The camera can sense the direction of the player’s movement from a neutral position. The setup is illustrated on Figure 1.
The video below shows the setup and interaction.
On a formative study with 12 participants players had to perform two sets of tasks. By observation and user feedback I was able to gather several design insights on naturalness of interaction, fatigue, and keyboard use.
The study demonstrated the feasibility of adding body-based interaction to desktop gaming.
It was observed that body-based interaction on a desktop game can have possible benefits in multitasking, learnability, and enjoyment of the game.
This work was published as a CHI 2009 Work-In-Progress paper.
This work was also selected to participate in the ACM Student Research Competition at CHI 2009.