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Using a Mobile Phone as a “Wii-like” Controller for Playing Games on a Large Public Display.

This journal paper relates to the creation of the world’s first accelerometer controlled game using mobile phones in conjunction with a large public display. This research was undertaken before the appearance of smartphones or feature phones that made such sensors readily available. This was made possible due to Paul Coulton’s long standing cooperation with Nokia running the Mobile Experience Design Group of elite Universities selected by Nokia including MIT, DTU in Denmark, ETH Zurich, and Parsons: New School of Design. Through this cooperation, Nokia allowed us to ‘hack’ the firmware on their sports phone model (Nokia 5500) which allowed access to the accelerometer’s data as, at that point, they simply provided a pedometer. Through this we were able to create a novel gesture based control framework that was dubbed Poppet and hence the worlds first games of this type. The games produced using this framework featured in Paul Coulton’s keynote, “Using Touch, Sight, and Gesture in Mobile Games", at the Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, USA, March 2007. GDC is the premier event for the games industry and this talk attracted significant press coverage (e.g. EDGE online) as it presented the radical idea, at that time, of using the Nintendo Wii for inspiration in creating novel interactions for mobile games. One of the games subsequently developed by two of Paul Coulton’s students used the framework and went on to win the Nokia European Games Innovation Competition. A demo of Tilt Racer can be seen at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqYVJ0zpDx8 (12,992 views)

http://www.edge-online.com/news/mobiles-could-out-wii-wii/