The 5500 was probably the first European phone as ever Japan led the way with 3rd party accessible sensors( but as usual Europe tends to look east rather than west). Like the turning gravity idea haven’t seen it on mobile although a lot of the Nintendo games use it.

Hi Paul,

Interesting that Japanese phones already had 3rd party accessible acceleration sensors before the 5500. Was it possible to use them with Java ME (the API for that is rather new), or how else was it possible to access them on phones before the 5500?

Anyway, I tried it a while ago, but it was very difficult as someone from Europe to get access to phones from Japan - or even to development kits for those phones.

About the Nintendo games: yes, games like Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii work with changing the perspective etc. It's not that the idea of changing gravity in a game environment has never been in the world anytime before that - it's about the intuitive combination of this concept with the acceleration sensor as an integral part of the game concept.

Again, as far as I know, the Nintendo DS doesn't have an accelerometer, so you can't turn it upside down to change the gravity, which is the understandable and natural way to do so. Turning the Wii Remote to change the gravity wouldn't be very practical and hasn't been implemented in any game that I know.

My understanding from a Japanese colleague is that it was specific to the manufacturer and not the standard JSR. I guess in the same way that Nokia did with the NFC. You right about access I have been trying to get ones from Japan for years. My comment was a general one in regard that I beleive computing in general has been dominated by West Coast American influences and for mobile we could learn a lot from Japan and Korea.
I think your mixing physical game mechanic with game play a number of games, including Paper Mario, have allowed you to switch the gravity though not always with a physical rotation. What your doing (I’m assuming) is trying to matching a game mechanic to hopefully an intuitive physical action but in the case of gravity switching this might be arguable its not as logical say as blowing into the microphone to make the ship move across the DS for instance. However its interesting.

I think the mapping used in the game is indeed executed in a very logical and intuitive way, which adds to the whole game experience.

If you turn your phone upside down, the ceiling of the environment gets the new floor - exactly as the user sees it on the screen. Same if you turn your phone 90°, you can walk on the original walls.

A game console is therefore essentially simulating this principle by just rotating a virtual camera. In contrast to this, on a mobile device the virtual environment can be directly linked to the physical world. I think the video demonstrates quite well how this integrates into the game.

I think we may have to agree to disagree in this one. I agree that you’re changing the environment and that affects the character but in essence then you have simply created a marble with legs and the gravity change isnt actually noticed. In the real world we don’t turn rooms upside down so it’s not an intuitive mapping as it doesnt have the same cognitive mapping as say shaking a can of drink to make it fizz or swinging the phone to be a lasso

That's true, we don't turn rooms upside down. But essentially, the screen is a window to a virtual world. Like if you'd put small creatures into a bottle. If you'd turn the bottle, you'd also expect all the characters to fall to the other side and then live on the former ceiling and not remain glued to the former floor, which is now floating in the air. In that sense, it is an intuitive mapping if the game world of a jump and run game is also affected by the way you're holding the phone.

Then what you just desribed is exactly the same as the marble constrained in the maze

The comparison is valid from a general point of view. The differentiation is that the game actually goes farther than this, which is not reflected in the description text in order to keep it short.

In the game, the floor *is* the floor in a traditional jump&run-sense, where the character should normally move - not just a border of a marble maze. If you turn the phone and with that change the gravity in the game, the character transforms into a special floating mode with different movement characteristics. Additionally, the gravity changes require energy and are therefore restricted in time; it isn't possible to just move anywhere you'd like for any amount of time, like in a marble maze game.

Therefore, the short gravity changes, which can be intuitively done by turning the phone, are a game element that can be cleverly used in puzzles, but it still stays a jump&run-game in the traditional sense.

Ok this is definitely my last word ;) for me that’s a nice concept like finding anti-gravity boots in a game but I still see that as being less intuitive because the boots provide a physical representation of the unnatural act ( I don’t mean this in a weird way). Anyway good luck to your students with this.

While gravity boots would be unnatural themselves, turning the mobile phone on top actually makes the gravity boots natural for the virtual world simulated in the phone - and this is the extension to the normal jump & run genre the game tries to explore.

Of course, SlidersEdge not an invention of a whole new game genre - on that level, almost every game requires the player to control a character in one way or another, no matter if it's a car, a marble or a person. But at least I'd love to see a full commercial game on N-Gage where the accelerometer/magnetometer/etc doesn't just serve as an input method that could easily be replaced by keys, but where the whole game is evolving around it. SlidersEdge is one idea, a marble game is another, and I'm sure there are many other game concepts that'd work well in that respect.

So let's continue to explore and discuss this at the next events :)

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