Output details

Using 'Tilt' as an Interface to control 'No Button' 3-D Mobile Games.

Phones, unlike games consoles, have an interface that is optimised for making phone calls and sending messages, rather than playing games and this research was at the forefront of developing a new ‘tilt’ interaction paradigm to combat this limitation, which was particularly problematic for games design. This research was conducted in the years before touch screen devices emerged and when the standard ITU keypad, with its physical grid layout of numerical keys, was the dominant Interface. This meant that game designers were restricted in what interactions could be designed within games as any complex button combinations would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for players to use. This limitation led to the so-called ‘one button’ paradigm, whereby it became common practice within mobile games design to limit the interaction so that they could be controlled with a single finger. Whilst this paradigm provided a solution it severely restricted game designers’ ability to vary the controls within the games. This research created an interaction framework that enabled designers and developers to go beyond these limits by using accelerometers to allow player gestures such as tilt to control the games and was enabled by the results from previous research that produced the Poppet framework to provide such control. It is worth noting that this framework also allowed colleagues from computing (Rene Mayrhofer and Hans Gellersen in their paper, ‘Shake well before use: two implementations for implicit context authentication’) to create a novel means of pairing two mobile phones using gesture. The game produced (Tunnel Run) to demonstrate these new interface design axioms was the world’s first 3D mobile game to be controlled entirely by gesture running on a commercial mobile phone.

A demo of Tunnel Run can be found at the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6cVtkc3sV8 (14,249 views)