pyWuzzler - accelerometer-controlled table soccer on your phone.

Austria is currently one of the host countries of the Euro 2008, the UEFA European Football Championship. Naturally, soccer is one of the biggest topics in our country at the moment, even though our chances of winning the tournament are, well, not so high.

To compensate for this, Benjamin Gmeiner and Yen-Chia Lin, two students of the Mobile Computing department of the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), have developed a new application called “pyWuzzler”.

In short, it’s a table soccer game on a S60 phone, which you control through the accelerometer. After all, Austria won the world championship in table soccer in the year 2006, something that won’t happen too soon for traditional soccer.

The whole frenetic game might be a bit too difficult to play on a phone. Therefore, the students have reduced it to a head-to-head match of the two attacking players against the goalkeeper (controlled by an artificial intelligence). Score as many goals as you can within two minutes!

How to score a goal? It’s intuitive, just by turning your phone. Change the inclination of the phone to move the attacking players (red) to the right and left. Turn the phone to trigger a shot. The movement of the ball is based on a small physics engine to simulate accurate movement. With this control scheme, you can even perform tricks like in a real table soccer match, as can be seen in the YouTube video.

pyWuzzler is available for free from symbianresources.com. The source code is published under the Apache Licence.