ARHunter: A Multiplayer Game Using Gestural Input in a Location-Sensitive and Immersive Environment Koji YataniUniversity of Tokyo Masanori SugimotoUniversity of Tokyo Hiromichi HashizumeNational Institute of Informatics

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 2 Outline Introduction Our System Demo Video System Architecture Future Works

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 3 Introduction Various types of interaction techniques and interactive environments for entertainment applications have been developed Especially, technologies combining the real world and the virtual world are greatly expected to play an important role in the future entertainment computing environments

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 4 Our Proposed System: ARHunter A Whack-a-mole like game environment that has three major features An immersive game environment is created by overlaying computer-generated graphics onto the real world Positions and orientations of multiple players moving around in the real world are used to affect a scenario of a game A player's gesture and action are also captured and used as input to an application

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 5 Demo Video

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 6 Technologies Used in ARHunter Sensors are embedded in a hammer Inertial sensors for gesture recognition An optical marker for location recognition These recognition technologies were originally developed in our other projects

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 7 Technologies Used in ARHunter Players’ action and movement are reflected in real-time Players can conduct strike actions anytime and anywhere at the game arena Monsters can try to escape when players get close to them (It’s impossible in a real whack-a-mole game)

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 8 Rules of ARHunter Two playing modes Match-up mode (competitive play) Tag-team mode (collaborative play) In the current implementation, two players can play ARHunter at the same time

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 9 Rules of ARHunter Match-up mode (competitive play) Each player is required to annihilate only his/her enemy monsters A player has to strike a monster with the hammer twice in order to kill it If a player kills a monster of the other player by mistake, the total number of his/her enemy monsters increases as a penalty A player wins the game when he/she has annihilated his/her all enemy monsters faster than the other player

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 10 Rules of ARHunter Tag-team mode (collaborative play) Players are required to annihilate the enemy monsters collaboratively Three different colored monsters appear and they have different properties (e.g., moving speed or energy) They win the game when players have annihilated all the enemy monsters within the time-limit

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 11 Interesting Observation in ARHunter One player frequently interrupted another player with his arm or his body Such physical interactions excited players to enhance their engagement A player concealed the other player's monsters with his shadow caused by the light from the projector It is interesting that players could take advantage of the drawback of the system

Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and 12 Future Works Enlarging a game arena of ARHunter Currently about 1.2 meters by 0.9 meters Allow more than two players to participate in a game Investigating in more details the opportunities of how we combine immersive environments with gestural input technologies in entertainment computing

Thank you!