Playing into the wild: A gesture-based interface for gaming in public spaces

Gestural-based interfaces have become one of the fundamental technologies that can determine the success of new computer games. In fact, computer games today offer interaction paradigms that go well beyond the use of remote controls, letting players directly perform exchanges with the objects and characters that compose the virtual worlds that are displayed in front of them. To perform such exchanges, new algorithms and technologies have been devised which include advanced visual recognition schemes, new video cameras and accelerometer sensors. At the same time, other important trends are also quietly emerging in the same domain: game designers, in fact, are slowly shifting their attention out of the walls of gaming fanatics homes, broadening their interests to computer games that can be played in public spaces, as exhibitions and museums. However, to the best of our knowledge, only a very limited amount of research experiences have taken into account the problem of producing computer games, based on gesture-based interfaces that well suit such settings. Hence, in this paper we address the problem of differentiating the design of a gesture-based interface for a console from the problem of designing it for a public space setting. Moreover, we will show that within a public space, it is possible to narrow down the vision algorithms that can well support the recognition of complex actions, whereas solely relying on a simple webcam. In particular, we will describe the design and implementation of an interface that well suits public immersive scenarios, since it is based on a simple and efficient set of algorithms which, combined with the intelligence given by the knowledge of the context of where a game is played, leads to a fast and robust interpretation of hand gestures. To witness this last aspect, we will report on the results obtained from the deployment of a computer game we specifically developed for public spaces, termed Tortellino X-Perience, which has been enjoyed by hundreds of visitors at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.