UKI: universal Kinect‐type controller by ICE Lab

Abstract

Summary Universal Kinect‐type‐controller by ICE Lab (UKI, pronounced as ‘You‐key’) was developed to allow users to control any existing application by using body motions as inputs. The middleware works by converting detected motions into keyboard and/or mouse‐click events and sending them to a target application. This paper presents the structure and design of core modules, along with examples from real cases to illustrate how the middleware can be configured to fit a variety of applications. We present our designs for interfaces that decode all configuration details into a human‐interpretable language, and these interfaces significantly promote user experience and eliminate the need for programming skill. The performance of the middleware is evaluated on fighting‐game motion data, and we make the data publicly available so that they can be used in other researches. UKI welcomes its use by everyone without any restrictions on use; for instance, it can be used to promote healthy life through a means of gaming and/or used to conduct serious research on motion systems. The middleware serves as a shortcut in the development of motion applications—coding of an application to detect motions can be replaced with simple clicks on UKI. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Motion Recommender for Preventing Injuries During Motion Gaming

“…The proposed IA-MR was evaluated by measuring the effects from IA-MR intervention when the player plays a fighting game called FightingICE [27], which has all relevant features of typical fighting games and has been developed from scratch without using game ROMs and made publicly available by our laboratory for research purpose. A set of motions used in this game, in this experiment, is set based on our previous study [8], [11], i.e., there are a total of 24 motions, we distribute game skills to motions related to the left and the right side of the body as equal as possible. As shown in Fig.…”

“…Whenever a motion performed by the player is detected, UKI will convert it to keyboard and/or mouse-click events and send them to a targeted game for executing in-game actions [8].…”

“…Decrease in gap s leads to increase in Bal; dec x , computed by (7), estimates decrease in gap s when the player performs the motion x, and in (7), mm s (x) represents expected increase in the momentum of the sth body segment by this motion (i.e., an amount to be added to am s ). After dec of all motions in use are obtained, their values are normalized into the scale of 0 to 1 by min-max normalization, resulting in F Bal (x) in (8).…”

“…We have run a project of developing a middleware for promoting healthy motion gaming. We introduced UKI [8], a middleware application that allows players to play any existing games by using body motions as inputs. This tool played an important role in several studies on health promotion [9].…”

KIND‐DAMA: A modular middleware for Kinect‐like device data management

“…The growing need for human‐computer gestural interaction has led to the development of middlewares for data management from heterogeneous input devices . Their purpose is to serve as a unified interface layer that allows a transparent communication between end‐user gestural applications and physical devices.…”