User experiences with mobile phone camera game interfaces

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a comparative study investigating different input interfaces for a mobile phone games application. A standard mobile phone joystick interface is compared with a phone camera interface to detect the phone translation and tilt to control a ball's movement within various levels of difficulty of a virtual maze game. Game completion times together with the resultant user experience for each of the games was collected during the studies. Results indicate that the joystick control provided the fastest completion times for each game, but with the lowest levels of user engagement. The Tilt interface, although perceived as challenging by the participants, provided the greatest level of user involvement, independent of game complexity. The design of appropriate human interfaces which go beyond the standard phone keypad is suggested. The selection and design of these interfaces should also consider the intended user experience for the game.

Tilt-controlled mobile games: Velocity-control vs. position-control

“…Their research showed that mobile devices are easy to manoeuvre and this translates into using tilt-input for a variety of interactions, including panning [3]. Panning is the use of a device's camera or position sensor to track a user's movements and convert them to the movements of a controlled view in the game.…”

“…It is worth mentioning as well that while most research using device tilt as an input control uses data from a built-in sensor -typically an accelerometer -some research on tilt input uses the device's camera combined with image processing to compute the device's position and movement [e.g., 3,7,12,14,18]. The main disadvantage in using camera data is the substantial processing required in converting camera images to device movement.…”

Dual Face Interaction in Handheld Augmented Reality Environments

“…Reference [21] presents a gestural interface for a mobile phone games application, or specifically a maze game at which the user controls the movement of a ball through a maze. A camera on the phone which is looking at a visual code marker is used to detect tilt and translation of the phone, resulting in the ball movement.…”

Using a Camera Phone as a Mixed‐Reality Laser Cannon

“…The player moves around this mixed-reality space by moving his phone and firing using the centre key of the joy pad. Other games have evolved to use visual codes to either detect movement [9], to imply, locate, or interact with objects such as ConQwest by Area Code [3].…”