Kinetics: A Mathematical Model for an On-Screen Gamepad Controllable by Finger-Tilting
Shuichi Kurabayashi · 2019
With the rise of smartphones and mobile games, a new interaction model is in demand to allow rapid and fine-grained control of a player character. This paper presents an on-screen gamepad with novel touchpoint analytics that enables a user to input both direction and velocity by changing only the angle of the finger, while otherwise maintaining its position on the touchscreen. The unique feature of this gamepad, called Kinetics, is a mathematical model for measuring an intentional finger motion and acceleration from a continuous sequence of touch events, obtained when a user changes thumb angle, by suppressing the effects of ambiguous and noisy activities. Kinetics allows a user to play a mobile game almost as if there were an invisible control stick on the screen. This paper describes a practical system implementation and empirical evaluation studies.