From the Desktop to the Tabletop: Bringing Virtual Games into the Physical World
Date
2006-10-31
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Abstract
Realism has become the watchword for modern games games now
boast realistic lighting effects, realistic physics, realistic animation
systems and realistic AI. Realism is highly sought, simply because a realistic
game is a compelling one; as games become more and more indistinguishable
from reality, gamers are more willing to suspend disbelief, and to lose
themselves in the game world. When the idea of realistic gaming is taken to
the logical extreme, one tends to imagine something akin to holodeck from
Star Trek a perfect immersive experience which could reproduce the sight,
sound, and touch of any scenario. Why is it that modern games fall short of
the perfect immersion provided by the holodeck? Graphics are the most
obvious discrepancy. Admittedly, the imagery produced by the holodeck is much
better than anything we can reasonably create today. But if modern games were
to attain perfect graphical photorealism, would this alone create a
holodeck-like experience for the player? Obviously not; a key component of
the experience is still missing namely, a sense of physical immersion.
Although modern games are more realistic than ever before there exist two
constraints which have served to limit the player s sense of immersion since
the advent of videogaming itself. First, in conventional gaming action is
constrained to a flat display space, usually a video monitor. The game
experience is confined to a screen, seldom going beyond and engaging the
player in the external, physical world. Second, the player s ability to
interact with the game is usually tied to an arbitrary input device such as a
mouse, keyboard or game pad. The player is never free to act on the game
world directly. Instead, he or she must issue all commands through this
intermediary device. It is our belief that mixed reality a field of research
which attempts to integrate virtual entities into a user s physical
environment can address both of these problems simultaneously. Due largely
to advances in hardware and software, implementing mixed reality is now more
accessible and affordable than ever before. In this paper we attempt to
illustrate the potential that mixed reality has for gaming and through a
simple videogame implementation, Save Em, demonstrate how easily this
technique can be applied.
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Computer Science