Having warmed myself up with a small game rant (sorry Andreas) I am off to a hopefully sunny San Francisco (hence the quote from Oscar Wilde) for the great gathering of the game nerds at GDC. I am speaking at Mobile GDC on How do we socialise mobile games? and instead of often technology inspired talks I am getting all ‘touchy and feely’ around the premise of games as social information appliances or social objects. If anyone from here is there feel free to say hi and I will be the one NOT talking about the IPhone.

It seems a long time ago since I blogged about the operation of the accelerometer sensors and made a plea for their inclusion as a standard feature (I am of course assuming the positive outcome was because people actually listened to me rather than me being just prophetic ). Anyway I have already discussed in previous blogs about Streetview and other aspects of Point ‘N’ Seek utilising the magnetometer sensor (generally described as the digital compass) so here are some practical details of how it works in practice (I always feel a visualisation helps). As with the accelerometer in its raw form you have three outputs x,y,z which means that you can find directional information ,were your phone is pointing, whatever its orientation. For example the Figure below shows the outputs on the three axis for the phone held with the screen parallel to the users face (i.e. upright) and in the normal portrait orientation and when the phone is held so that the screen is parallel with the ground as you would use a normal compass. The plots start with the phone facing North then rotated through East, South and West and pausing at each alignment for around 5 seconds and you can clearly see the four compass points.

The illustrate the actual rotational change the following figure illustrates the three outputs for a continuous clockwise rotation with the phone held upright going clockwise from North.

The second graph of the figure is after applying some simple signal processing whereby we can combine these outputs along phone orientation from the accelerometer to produce an output that could easily be turned into an angle from North. Indeed the sensor API does provide a range of options one being for an angle from North as shown. 

The problem but we have found this appears to be slightly sluggish (as illustrated) and my feeling is that a low pass filter has been applied to give a smooth scrolling of Maps when used for navigation. However, I have other plans for the sensor so will likely create my own algorithms using the raw outputs previously illustrated. Hopefully people will find this blog as useful as the one on accelerometers but judging by the time lag from last time you might want to return to this in about 12 months .

BTW should have said the data is from a S60 application running on the Nokia 6210 Navigator

As Arto has recently done some interesting blogs relating to bio-signal and pain monitoring and Nokia launching a phone Heart rate Monitor combo I thought its useful to discuss the extension of the work  Carlos and I have done using an Heart Rate Monitor  to provide mobile exergaming. In this research we experimented with four different user input controls to the game to try and find a balance between benefits to the heart and game play as shown in the following video.

The following figure shows Carlos heart rate for the four schemes presented in the video. Interesting although the third scheme (all actions triggered by a small physical jump) provides the greatest exertion its probably the hardest to play and the final scheme ( all physical movement control ) provides the best balance between exertion and game play.