Bringing context into play
Radu-Daniel Vatavu, Štefan Gheorghe Pentiuc, Tudor Cerlinca · 2007
We present a new interaction technique that we call Context Interaction and we discuss it in relation with computer games due to their popularity. Although the HCI in gaming benefits of many devices and controllers as well as from many interaction metaphors, they only allow players to control their characters in the game and not the context of the action or the game's environment. The environment change option, if at all supported, may sometimes be carried out in special editing sessions before the actual game begins, e.g. by choosing the track for car racing. We present a simple computer vision technique that allows players to interact with the game environment in real-time and thus to perform Context Interaction. Objects placed on a table are captured by a video camera and transformed into game elements with a real-time feedback within the game. Context Interaction comes as complementary multimodal interaction to the commonly encountered game controllers. It is simple, intuitive and provides real-time feedback.