ARHunter: A Multiplayer Game Using Gestural Input in a Location-Sensitive

and Immersive Environment

Koji Yatani University of TokyoMasanori Sugimoto University of TokyoHiromichi Hashizume National Institute of

Informatics

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Outline

• Introduction• Our System• Demo Video• System Architecture• Future Works

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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

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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

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Demo Video

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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 originallydeveloped in our other projects

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 gam

e

• Investigating in more details the opportunities of how we combine immersive environments with gestural input technologies in entertainment computing

Thank you!

http://www.itl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ARHunter