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Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog
Motion Control for 3-D Mobile Virtual/Augmented Reality Worlds
coultonp | 05 March, 2008 21:23
As many of you will realise I have been a long term advocate of accelerometers on phones and have a number of students having worked in this area. Today I wanted to present the novel S60 API developed by my PhD student Fadi Chehimi to provide 3-D motion control for navigating with 3-D virtual and augmented environments running on mobile phones which we have called Mirage-X. To demonstrate the power of the API , Fadi and I came up with the very simple game we have called Mirage Money the aim of which is that players ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen. There game has two playing modes:Real Mirage where coins are augmented on images captured by the phone camera, and Virtual Mirage where the coins are floating in a virtual, sky-bounded environment. As these concepts are best explained with a video we have created the one below.
This game further illustrates the power of accelerometers and in particular the advantage of this interface is that it not only minimizes the use of buttons on the phone it also allows a more intuitive interface experience and allows the user to maintain the optimum viewing angle to the screen.
We are also currently investigating two further game extensions that will expand the possibilities of using the API, the first will allow two players to battle through space over a Bluetooth connection and second will utilize the N95’s GPS to create a novel augmented reality location based game.
The use of GPS with the API has then obvious uses within the fields of tourism or information services but in an ideal case we would also have access to a digital compass to provide accurate orientation. Having pleaded the case for accelerometers in the past can I now suggest a digital compass? 
As it has lots of possible benefits and in particular I can see it helping with pedestrian navigation.
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Fantastic!
Sorcery-ltd | 06/03/2008, 10:43
You've crossed one of my "projects to get around to when I have time one day" off the list! To really complete it we just need a series of games like the one you mention as a first extension. I'm thinking of some fairly old games like Elite and X-Wing.
I think space is better for this technology because you have no issues with angle of phone relative to horizon. I'd also imagined this with the phone in portrait orientation so you can use the phone like a joystick with the just the fire button in the centre - entirely one-handed gaming.
Keep up the fantastic work and do let us know if you're going to publish this API somehow.
Mark
Re: Motion Control for 3-D Mobile Virtual/Augmented Reality Worlds
coultonp | 06/03/2008, 10:49
Itomuta
We would love to talk to someone about partnering with the API to get it out to the community. I would hate for this to be another of my projects that just sat on a shelf somewhere.
re:Fantastic
coultonp | 06/03/2008, 10:53
Mark
Cheers for the comments. I very much had Elite and X-Wing in mind when we were thinking about the two player game. I am hoping we may be able to have it to take to the S60 summit. I hoping we will be able to pulish the API soon as we are very keen to see this area extended.
Open source?
Sorcery-ltd | 06/03/2008, 15:53
Following ltomuta's blog posts the other day about open source projects on Symbian/S60, perhaps this API implementation could be released as open source? (possibly Nokia could purchase it from the current copyright holders).
I've no idea how flexible it is but it might be nice to be able to modify it for a driving game so you tilt forward to accelerate, back to brake and then steer fairly naturally by turning left and right.
Also, does it work with the TV output on the N95? Then you've just turned your phone into one of those games console inside a controller things you get full of retro games.
Mark
Openess
coultonp | 06/03/2008, 18:29
Mark
We wouldlike people to be able to use it but it would also be nice for Fadi to have somekind of reward for his hard work.
At the moment we are building in a range of different options as you quite rightly pointed out for driving you could use tilt as acceleration and brake as with did with TiltRacer but you dont get the same users experience in terms of keeping the image central to your view.
The image in the video is taken from the tv out so yes you could use it for a console game and its one of the things we want to play with in the space version.
Re: Motion Control for 3-D Mobile Virtual/Augmented Reality Worlds
ltomuta | 06/03/2008, 07:52
Will this new API be published? Partnered maybe? ;)