Controls for mobile games are mostly based on touch or physical gestures. This work presents a novel concept integrating tilt- and touch-interaction with different mappings depending on the device's orientation.

Mobile Games with Touch and Indirect Sensor Control Dirk Wenig, Marc Herrlich, Daniel Böhrs and Rainer Malaka

Controls for games on mobile devices, e.g. smartphones, are mostly based on touch interaction or physical gestures like tilting the device. Both approaches often interfere with the player's view of the game world, e.g. by occluding parts of the screen, enforcing a limited view angle or fast shaky movements of the whole device. We present a novel control concept for mobile games integrating tilt-interaction and touch-input with different mappings depending on the current orientation of the device and a corresponding view of the virtual world. The result is a cleaner user interface with no distracting objects but enhanced interaction possibilities. An evaluation against software buttons shows that while our control concept is comparable regarding objective performance it significantly increases the subjective user experience.

Dirk Wenig, Marc Herrlich, Daniel Böhrs and Rainer Malaka (2013) Mobile Games with Touch and Indirect Sensor Control In M&C 2013, Workshop Entertainment Computing: Mensch & Computer Workshopband: Interaktive Vielfalt, 261-266. Oldenbourg, Munich. | BibTex

Mobile Gaming with Indirect Sensor Control Daniel Böhrs, Dirk Wenig and Rainer Malaka

The rapid growth of the mobile gaming market and the steadily improved hardware of mobile phones enable developers to create complex and extensive 3D games on mobile phones. While most current casual games have simple interfaces with few buttons, 3D games require new control interfaces to providing sufficient control options without limiting the field of view on the screen. This is important to improve the user experience. Within this work new ideas based on the use of the accelerometer as indirect control mechanism are presented. The accelerometer is used to switch between different interaction layers, which are also different game views for the player. Combined with this concept a buttonless touch area interface is used. We are planning to evaluate the ideas with a 3D game prototype running on Android devices.

Daniel Böhrs, Dirk Wenig and Rainer Malaka (2012) Mobile Gaming with Indirect Sensor Control In ICEC 2012: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Entertainment Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7522, 441-444. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg. 10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_48 | BibTex