Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

Motion Controlled 3D Multi-player Space Game

coultonp — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:59:28 +0300

Having created a lot of interest in the community with our first motion controlled 3D game Mirage Money , Fadi and I are now unveiling its cooler big brother Mirage Space. It uses the same S60 Mirage-X API to create a motion controlled 3D space battle game in which you compete with opponents via Bluetooth to save the galaxy. As can be seen the video shows (me and Fadi playing and I win of course )players first select their space ship (in the video I am the Purple space ship and Fadi is Red space ship) and then they must engage in a space dogfight shooting their opponents as they appear on their screen. The player movement is controlled entirely through tilt but speed and fire are controlled via the joypad using up and centre button respectively.

As we are moving around 3D space a means of ascertaining the opponent’s position is required which appears as a smaller set of gun sights indicating the direction of the opponent from your current position and changes from white to blue when the opponent is behind you as shown in video. There is also a selectable navigation map (left or right on joypad) which is shown part through the video (on Fadi’s screen which is the Red ship) to allow further navigation.

At present we are doing some initial user trials to ensure we have the basic game play correct but after that we hope it will be able to be released for public trials as with Mirage Money. I know I am biased but I definately think this is one of the best games we have done so far and its great to play.

Motion Controlled 3-D Game now available MOSH

coultonp — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:13:03 +0200

Having been inundated with requests for the Motion Controlled 3-D game Mirage Money from my last blog, Fadi and I have now made the game available absolutely free on MOSH. However, we would very much appreciate feedback from users on their experience both on suggestions for improvement and whether people find the mixed reality mode interesting, the interface intuitive, etc. You can either leave them on MOSH (dont foget to rate it if you luv it), here, or send them to me.

ENJOY!

A Zero Button Game

coultonp — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:48:19 +0300

I have been meaning to write this blog since the Champion day in Singapore (yes I know I am slack) as it sprang from a conversation I was having with Kevin Sharp over dinner.

Basically, we were talking about mobile interfaces and in particular the desirability of the one button game but when I was showing him the game my student Paul Gilbertson had just completed we realised it was in fact a no button game.

The game itself is called Tunnel Run and is designed to run on one of my favourite development phones the Nokia 5500. Those of you in the know will realise that this is the device with the in-built 3D accelerometers that I am so fond of. It builds on the Poppet framework we created for Tilt Racer and Paul has used this to create a Novel 3D driving game. The idea was to test the validity of ‘tilt’ as a valid input for mobile gaming we would not create a game that traditionally uses tilt as an input sucj as a marble game.

During the trials, we recorded the users’ comments and then got them to asses the merits of the tilt interface compared to the traditional keypad interface for game playing. One of the most usual comments when the users first started the tilt game was “that’s so cool” and “this is a lot more fun than the other one”.

The unanimous opinion was that the tilt interface was the most fun and they all preferred it to the traditional joypad and a number of the users said it was “easier if you have big fingers”. Further, all of the users identified the problem with the tilting the game forward as a game design issue rather than an interface issue and were very impressed by the granularity of tilt control which appears to have been a significant problem when using the camera.

Interestingly a number of users asked whether “this was a commercial phone” and “whether they will put the sensors in all new phones” which, along with the comment “this is great I don’t usuall play these types of game” should be encouragement to manufacturers to consider the incorporation of the technology to a wide range of devices.

You can see the game in action here and if more phones appear with 3D accelerometers maybe we will publish it one of these days.

Augmenting our Mobile Reality!

coultonp — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:36:45 +0300

Once again its been too long since I had time to blog. Recently my student Fadi Chehimi and I have been working on the revisions of our paper “Augmented Reality 3D Interactive Advertisements on Smartphones” that was accepted for ICMB 07 and I thought its now a good time to share details of the project.

In this project we have developed a unique system that will allow complex and highly interactive visual 3-D adverts to be viewed on mobile phones equipped with a camera using a visual marker. In this system the user ‘selects’ s tag with his camera phone running the associated S60 AR software, termed ARMAD (Augmented Reality Mobile Advertisements), then download and ultimately superimpose 3-D model(s)/information on the location of the tag on screen.

In order to view and manipulate 3-D models on screen the user simply has to rotate around the tag, if it is fixed, or rotate the tag, if it is mobile. The products/info in the content of the ad will then be displayed from all angles as below.

Users can also zoom in/out of the model by moving their phone closer to or further away from the tag, but keeping it within the boundary of the screen.

Currently the tags we have designed are a bit on the large side but we are hoping we can perfect them to a smaller size and improve the flexibility of the software.

Obviously, advertisements are but one application for this type of Augmented Reality and you could imagine lots of applications for games, tourist information, etc.

could you be an urban outlaw?

coultonp — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:40:18 +0300

We have finally got round to arranging large scale experimental evaluation of our research project the serendipitous proximity shoot-em-up game Mobslinger.

We have therefore just put a beta version of the game on our site for testing by any one with a Bluetooth enabled phone who has a bit of time to waste with a few friends and fancy them selves as an urban outlaw. Currently it’s a J2ME version with only Bloodbath mode implemented but the S60 version will follow soon. We are going to put a league table (to enter your kill rate) on the site in the next few days together with the all important feedback form .

Although the first beta has limited game depth we would still welcome any comments from would be outlaws particularly on the following research questions:

whether its fun,

the social/work scenarios in which the played the game,

whether they played with friends or encountered strangers,

how it could be improved,

Other comments relating to probable porting issues; bugs, etc are also useful.

And to those of you who do download the game DRAW!

Mobile laser tag using S60 camera phones

coultonp — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:42:28 +0300

Here is a research project I have been doing with my PhD student Fadi Chehimi which attempts to take another look at using the camera on phones in games and particular harnessing some of the power of S60 (something, with a few notable exceptions, I feel hasn’t been fully explored in games). Mobilazer is a mixed-reality first person shoot-em-up game which engages two or more teams of players in an unbounded physical location. The software turns a player’s mobile phone camera into a form of ‘laser’ gun whereby he can shoot opposing players by interacting with specially designed visual tags. Once a tag is detected Mobilazer displays a targeted-sign, in the form of a circle centred at the coloured-tag, indicating the identification of the rival as shown in the figure below and our video on you tube.

When the targeted-sign is on screen, the player needs to move his phone to point the crosshair, which is always in the middle of the screen, at the tag. The player will be able to shoot his virtual laser beam to kill the opponent. The kills and points are controlled through interaction with a central game server communicating over the GPRS.

Mobilazer currently has four different playing modes available to choose from, all of which are to be initiated by a preformed social grouping these are Fortress, Last Man standing, Individual Battle Mode, and Group Battle Mode.

One of the essential elements for successful multi-player computer games is that of differentiating players’ experiences so that the game is balanced. Balance means that all players feel they have an equal chance of competing, keeping in mind the differentiation between experienced and non-experienced ones. Interestingly, this feature has not been given much consideration in mixed-reality games although it most likely ensures that players return to the game on multiple occasions. Therefore, in Mobilazer we have introduced a system of armours and weapons which allows both new players and more expert ones the opportunity to gain experience, and rewards returning players for their repeated game play.

Mobilazer Scoring
Equipment Type	Points Scored	Points Needed	Number of Hits
None	10		1
Bronzer Armour	20	30	2
Silver Armour	40	60	5
Gold Armour	60	90	10
Sniper	90	90	1
Tracker Gun	100	200	1
Dist < 5M	2
5m<Dist<10m	4
10m<Dist<15m	8
15m<Dist<20m	12
Dist>20m	20

One of the innovative features is The Sniper which allows a player to shoot tags that are much farther than the normal camera range. The effect is applied using Symbian-specific bitmap manipulation utilities that enlarge and clip images, rather than simply depending only on the camera API zooming functions

As yet we have only done the technical testing but we are hoping to start users trials soon as the the Bristish weather does seem to be getting better!

Using gesture as an interface for mobile applications

coultonp — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:13:36 +0200

Last week I was at the Game Developers Conference and heard many complaints about lack of innovation. With this in mind I gave a lecture on “Using Touch, Sight, and Gesture in Mobile Games”. Whilst I covered using RFID/NFC and the Camera on the mobile phone as a novel interface, the aspect that seems that drew most interest from the audience, and later on the web, were some demonstrations (available on Youtube: here and here) for games we (myself, Tamas Vajk and Will Bamford) created using the Nokia 5500 in-built accelerometers to control games running on a PC via Bluetooth . The original game was based on the old tron classice light riders is shown below but the videos show the newer Tilt Racer.

My proposition in the whole talk was that using Nintendo and the DS and Wii as an inspiration for attracting a non-traditional gamer audience (although some comments on web relating reports of my talk wrongly assumed I was suggesting phones as a replacement). I believe that accelerometers have an enormous potential for attracting non-gamers as Andreas Jakl already indicated and indeed atracting this audience was highlighted as the inspiration for the DS and Wii by shigeru Miyamoto in his keynote.To highlight this in a none-game setting I thought I would also add some plots of the sensor outputs to illustrate my point.

In the following we see the three accelerometer outputs when the phone was simply placed upon the desk. It can be seen that outputs x and y are approximately zero although some sensor noise is and output z is showing a positive 1 g force which is the effect of gravity on the device. Note: that this noise could be reduced by the application of a digital filer on the output values but in this case we are showing the raw data. Overall this Figure illustrates that the effects gravity provide a means of deducing the orientation of the phone which can then be utilized to provide a ‘tilt’ based controller.

In following we see the accelerometer outputs resulting from a rapid sideways movement of the phone across a desk. At the start we see outputs in the same state as in first Figure and then very large acceleration forces on y produced by the rapid sideways movement. There are some smaller residual artefacts from this movement seen in both x and z but this because the test was performed by hand rather than using a fixed jig and its difficult to isolate a movement completely under such conditions. We clearly show the potential for utilizing ‘hand gestures’ for the control of events within. However, gesture recognition requires careful study as the variation in how the user holds the phone could produce anomalous outputs and there is no method of obtaining the phones physical position within actual space.

The final figure shows the output after the phone has been dropped. The trace shows that initially the phone is held upright with the screen held at the top and gravity is acting on x. When the phone is dropped the effect of gravity is overcome and all three accelerometers are zero before the phone hits the floor with a jolt. The aim of the test was to show that the phone could be used to measure activity of a player as per the snowboarder application developed by Andreas and his students.

Hopefully the games and applications already developed highlight the potential for developers but I would also urge Nokia to add these sensors to as many of there devices as possible as having a critical mass of devices in the market will be essential for getting operators to take this seriously.

Shameless book plug!

coultonp — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:52:05 +0200

Having finally finished the version 9.0 S60 book I have been working on for a while with my fellow authors Reuben Edwards and Helen Clemson plus many others at Symbian Press and Wiley and I though I would share my joy in the fact that I have been told it will be launched at 3GSM in a few weeks. You will have to excuse my enthusiasm its my first book and even though I have published many academics papers in journals its much cooler to see your name on the front

The book is based on the exercises we do as part MSc in Mobile Games Design here at Lancaster University and takes the students from a simple console based card game up to a full GUI graphics based multiplayer version over Bluetooth. I hope useful particularly for new developers as I particularly want to encourage people to enjoy developing for mobile as much a I do.

When hand waving becomes a dangerous sport!

coultonp — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:57:19 +0200

I have been following the growing number of wii related accidents on the aptly named, wii have a problem, which ranges from black eyes and cut hands, from inadvertently hitting light fittings or friends, to broken monitors if the straps on the controller break.

This is interesting to me as we are just finishing a project called Poppet which allows the 5500 motion sensors to be used as a PC controller via Bluetooth. Perhaps I need to get some better accident cover before I test this!

PS: Has anyone got any details of how to get the J2ME drivers working. We have done the project for S60 and have got a J2ME version working on the emulator but cant get it to install on the phone.

mobile games for the blind?

coultonp — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:10:08 +0300

I have been at the Fun ‘n Games conference presenting some of our projects including the mobslinger game I blogged last week. There was a very interesting paper by Matthew Atkinson about making games accessible to the blind and partially sighted using an example of Audio-Quake. He later suggested to me that moblslinger was the only game he had seen that could easily be made for both blind people as well as sighted people. I must confess it is not some I had considered, but indeed is true, as the ‘draw’ code could be made an audio command for the blind and a much larger partially sighted and a physical indication is always provide on the ‘5’ key for reference.. This made me think given the great audio capabilities of many new phones as to whether many mobile phone games could be made more accessible? and are we falling into the trap the Matthew highlighted that ‘many game developers just think blind people wont want to play games’?