Gameplay Issues in the Design of 3D Gestures for Video Games (2006)

John Payne, Paul Keir, Jocelyn Elgoyhen, Mairghread McLundie, Martin Naef, Martyn Horner, Paul Anderson

Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art

paper

Comments:

This paper talks about the importance of designing 3D gestures and the relationship between gestures and gameplay. It discusses some important concepts such as affordance, mapping, and feedback. It stresses the importance of simplicity and the mapping of gestures to actions.

The team developed a 3D gesture capturing device which they call the 3motion. It uses a combination of accelerometers similar to a Wiimote to perform 3D gestures. It should be noted that this work was done almost a year before the Wii was released.

To test their device, several simple games were used. These included a tilt-ball game, an alarm game, the classic helicopter game, and a spell-casting game. Unique 3D gestures were defined for each game.

Two users were employed to test out each game and its gestures. Some games and their corresponding gestures had more success than others, which the researchers attribute to varying degrees of "informative tutorials, single word instructional phrases, effective semiotics and appropriate user feedback" among the games. These principles, they say, are very important to ensuring that "the gesture based interaction is intuitive, fun and rapidly understood."

While not initially an important factor, they came to realize that the gestures and the type of gameplay were tightly coupled and must be evaluated together.

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I was very interested in this paper particularly because of the final project for this class. We are also using 3D gestures, though with a glove instead of a handheld device.

We are also faced with the problem of designing the gestures for our system, and we plan on doing a preliminary study to help guide us to the correct gestures. We can use the insight of this paper to help guide us in out design.

I also wonder what influence the upcoming Wii and its controller had on this research, if any? I do not remember when the Wii was announced, unfortunately, though I doubt it was announced as early as this research.