The Brave Little Troll - a visual rhythm game for the Deaf and hearing-impaired children

The aim of this work is to reflect and document the multiple phases of the design and development process of The Brave Little Troll, a visual rhythm game for the Deaf and hearing-impaired children. The thesis consists of both the game and the written thesis. The paper is a valuable contribution to the design community as it provides a record of the project challenges and solutions. Thus being a useful resource for other project groups facing similar challenges. The work aims to describe on general level; the project's goals, audience, methods, challenges, solutions, results and limitations. The paper also addresses the future work and application of the game as well as the author's role and involvement in the project

ElectroCutscenes: Realistic Haptic Feedback in Cutscenes of Virtual Reality Games Using Electric Muscle Stimulation

Cutscenes in Virtual Reality (VR) games enhance story telling by delivering output in the form of visual, auditory, or haptic feedback (e.g., using vibrating handheld controllers). Since they lack interaction in the form of user input, cutscenes would significantly benefit from improved feedback. We introduce the concept and implementation of ElectroCutscenes, a concept in which Electric Muscle Stimulation (EMS) is leveraged to elicit physical user movements to correspond to those of personal avatars in cutscenes of VR games while the user stays passive. Through a user study (N=22) in which users passively received kinesthetic feedback resulting in involuntarily movements, we show that ElectroCutscenes significantly increases perceived presence and realism compared to controller-based vibrotactile and no haptic feedback. Furthermore, we found preliminary evidence that combining visual and EMS feedback can evoke movements that are not actuated by either of them alone. We discuss how to enhance realism and presence of cutscenes in VR games even when EMS can partially rather than completely actuate the desired body movements

The Feeling of Control: The Psychology Behind Immersive Controls in Video Games and Their Real World Effects

There is a phenomenon that can occur while playing video games where the player begins to feel similar sensations to the player character. This phenomenon, unnamed until now, has very little research directly related to it. There is plenty of indirect research that can be applied to this phenomenon, now called sensation mirroring. A review of both cognitive and psychobiological literature allows for major connections between human functions and how they interact with video game control schemes to be drawn. These connections help form a potential theory on the mechanisms of sensation mirroring and provide directions for future research on the topic

Augmenting the Task of Exercise Gamification: An Expert View on the Adoption of a New Technology for Deploying Existing Virtual Environments in Virtual Urban Exergames

Exergames commonly denote serious games and gamified systems that were developed for the sake of improving health and exercise adherence. One of the recent trends in exergaming are urban games. They are defined as “highly interdisciplinary digital games which root in such diverse fields as architecture and urban planning, healthcare sciences, and serious games research” (Knoell et al., 2014). Besides having various ‘physical benefits’, such as promoting movement patterns, urban exergames have the core task of psychologically motivating players to exercise more and inspire them to be physically active. While offering an innovative and an immersive way to exercise, urban games come also with the typical drawbacks which outdoor exercising generally has (e.g. being dependent on good weather and intimidation problems for obese people). A possible solution would be simulating urban games for indoor exercise. On top of augmenting the sedentary game input to a motion-based one, designing and developing 3D environments for virtual urban games is not an obvious task and it takes a vast amount of knowledge, time and budget to create a realistic world with a “tremendous appeal and a powerful attraction”. To bypass this challenge, we introduce in this work a new technology for accessing and gamifying existing game environments. Furthermore, we validate our approach by presenting the results of a qualitative research that we have conducted with the help of gamification experts and exergame designers

Bridging The Gap Between Fun And Fitness: Instructional Techniques And Real-world Applications For Full-body Dance Games

Full-body controlled games offer the opportunity for not only entertainment, but education and exercise as well. Refined gameplay mechanics and content can boost intrinsic motivation and keep people playing over a long period of time, which is desirable for individuals who struggle with maintaining a regular exercise program. Within this gameplay genre, dance rhythm games have proven to be popular with game console owners. Yet, while other types of games utilize story mechanics that keep players engaged for dozens of hours, motion-controlled dance games are just beginning to incorporate these elements. In addition, this control scheme is still young, only becoming commercially available in the last few years. Instructional displays and clear real-time feedback remain difficult challenges. This thesis investigates the potential for full-body dance games to be used as tools for entertainment, education, and fitness. We built several game prototypes to investigate visual, aural, and tactile methods for instruction and feedback. We also evaluated the fitness potential of the game Dance Central 2 both by itself and with extra game content which unlocked based on performance. Significant contributions include a framework for running a longitudinal video game study, results indicating high engagement with some fitness potential, and informed discussion of how dance games could make exertion a more enjoyable experience

Haptics Rendering and Applications

There has been significant progress in haptic technologies but the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the new society's human activities including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce and science would forever change if we learned how to capture, manipulate and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move forward, many commercial and technological barriers need to be overcome. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information that might reflect a desire to speak a physically- based language that has never been explored before. Due to constant improvement in haptics technology and increasing levels of research into and development of haptics-related algorithms, protocols and devices, there is a belief that haptics technology has a promising future

Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Master of Science

thesisHaptic feedback in modern game controllers is limited to vibrotactile feedback. The addition of skin-stretch feedback would significantly improve the type and quality of haptic feedback provided by game controllers. Skin-stretch feedback requires small forces (around a few newtons) and translations (as small as 0.5 mm) to provide identifiable direction cues. Prior work has developed skin-stretch mechanisms in two form factors: a flat form factor and a tall but compact (cubic) form factor. These mechanisms have been shown to be effective actuators for skin-stretch feedback, and are small enough to fit inside of a game controller. Additional prior work has shown that the cubic skin-stretch mechanism can be integrated into a thumb joystick for use with game controllers. This thesis presents the design, characterization, and testing of two skin-stretch game controllers. The first game controller provides skin stretch via a 2-axis mechanism integrated into its thumb joysticks. This controller uses the cubic skin-stretch mechanism to drive the skin stretch. Concerns that users' motions of the joystick could negatively impact the saliency of skin stretch rendered from the joystick prompted the design of a controller that provides 2-axis skin stretch to users' middle fingers on the back side of the controller. Two experiments were conducted with the two controllers. One experiment had participants identify the direction of skin stretch from a selection of 8 possible directions. This test compared users' accuracies with both controllers, and with five different finger restraints on the back-tactor controller. Results show that users' identification accuracy was similar across feedback conditions. A second experiment used skin stretch to rotationally guide participants to a randomized target angle. Three different feedback strategies were tested. Results showed that a strategy called sinusoidal feedback, which provided feedback that varied in frequency and amplitude as a function of the user's relative position to the tactor, performed significantly better on all performance metrics than the other feedback strategies. It is important to note that the sinusoidal feedback only requires two 1-axis skin-stretch actuators, which are spatially separated, in order to provide feedback. The other lower performing feedback strategies used two 2-axis skin-stretch actuators