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Contemporary Topics in Computer Graphics and Games

Selected Papers from the Eurasia Graphics Conference Series

by Veysi İşler (Volume editor) Haşmet Gürçay (Volume editor) Hasan Kemal Süher (Volume editor) Güven Çatak (Volume editor)
©2020 Edited Collection 414 Pages

Summary

This book provides an introduction and overview of the rapidly evolving topics of computer graphics and games, presenting the new perspectives employed by researchers and the industry, highlighting the recent empirical findings. Bringing selected papers from the Eurasia Graphics conference series together, the book aims to discuss issues, solutions, challenges, and needs for a better understanding of computer graphics and games.
The Games and Simulation section of this book covers the topics of game user experience, game narrative, playability heuristics, human computer interaction and various computer simulations. The Computer Graphics section deals with 3D modelling, procedural content generation, visualization, and interaction techniques.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Preface
  • About the editors
  • About the book
  • Citability of the eBook
  • Table of Contents
  • Abbreviations
  • Games and Simulation
  • 1. Controllers in VR Game User Experience: Perceived User Performance on a VR Puzzle Game
  • 2. A Taxonomy and Terminology Study on Embedded Narrative: A Case Study of Bloodborne
  • 3. Design by Play: Utilizing Sims 4 in Preliminary Architectural Design
  • 4. Exploratory Research on the Gamification of Exercise for Fibromyalgia Using Virtual Reality
  • 5. Deconstructing Game Stories with Propp’s Morphology
  • 6. Methodological Review of Playability Heuristics
  • 7. Explorations in Game Experience: A Case Study of ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’
  • 8. Hybrid Narrative Generation with Deferred Planning
  • 9. Cloth Tearing Simulation
  • 10. A Dynamic Exit Choice Method for Real-Time
  • 11. Keep Brushing! Developing Healthy Oral Hygiene Habits in Young Children with an Interactive Toothbrush
  • 12. Enhancing Gamepad Fps Controls with Tilt-Driven Sensitivity Adjustment
  • Computer Graphics
  • 13. Experimental Analysis of Qem Based Mesh Simplification Techniques
  • 14. Procedural City Generation Using Cellular Automata
  • 15. Object Selection with New Generation Kinect Camera in 3D Environment
  • 16. 3D Fountain Modeling From Single Image
  • 17. Real-Time Distant Light Filtering Using Gaussian Mixture Model
  • 18. An Efficient Plugin for Representing Heterogeneous Translucent Materials
  • 19. Fast Data Parallel Radix Sort Implementation in Directx 11 Compute Shader to Accelerate Ray Tracing Algorithms
  • 20. Bottlenecks in Distributed Real-Time Visualization of Huge Data on Heterogeneous Systems
  • 21. Transfer Function Refinement for Exploring Volume Data
  • 22. Simple Vertical Human Climbing Control with End Effector State Machines
  • 23. Interacting with Boids in an Incompressible Fluid Environment

1.   Controllers in VR Game User Experience: Perceived User Performance on a VR Puzzle Game

Mehmet Ilker Berkman

Visual Communication Design Department Bahcesehir University Istanbul, Turkey ilker.berkman@comm.bau.edu.tr

Barbaros Bostan

Game Design Department Bahcesehir University Istanbul, Turkey barbaros.bostan@comm.bau.edu.tr

Berk Yalcin

Game Design Department Bahcesehir University Istanbul, Turkey berkyalcin7@gmail.com

AbstractThis paper investigates the effects of controllers on virtual reality experiences and the feeling of presence associated with it. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are in development since 1950s and they have been used for military and research purposes before. However, recent technological advances enabled VR to become a consumer product and more developers joined the market. Oculus Touch is one of the new devices developed for the new VR era and we focused on this input device in terms of its usability and possible contribution to a sense of presence. Oculus Touch and a classic gamepad have been compared in both usability and their effects on gameplay using a mixed methodology via questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. In conclusion, usability of Oculus Touch has been superior but this superiority does not affect the players’ experience of the game in terms of presence, which also brings the question whether presence questionnaires designed in the 90s are still capable of measuring it in the new era or not.

Keywords— virtual reality; controllers; presence; immersion; usability

I. Introduction

After decades of research and development efforts, the HMDs (head-mounted displays) began to be mass-produced as a consumer-level hardware in March 28, 2016 by the company named Oculus VR, which is owned by Facebook. Although it was not the first attempt to make VR technology commercially available, it became a success unlike the precursors in 1990s. The 2016 was the year of VR, while the companies like Sony and HTC/Valve Corporation released their own HMDs that can be connected to personal computers and gaming consoles. By the meantime, VR had already become an experience that can be enjoyed via mobile devices such Google Cardboard released on March 2014 or Samsung Gear VR released on November 2015.

Among several reasons such as high-cost hardware and low-level graphic quality, which disappoints users, the 90s commercial HMDs also failed due to limited number of VR experiences offered to market. Learning from the past, Oculus followed a strategy of making the hardware available for the software developers as development kits before it is offered to end-users. Besides the hardware, the software development kit had been made available for free of charge, which was immediately integrated in popular game engines. As a result, a software habitat had been formed before the commercial HMDs were available.

On the other hand, early development kits did not contain any VR specific controllers. Some of the devices were shipped with 2-degree-of-freedom (2DoF) hand-held game controllers designed for game-consoles. As a result, the content created by the VR developers were mainly depended on the interactions using the HMD’s positional tracking system. Additional interactions are based on keyboard and mouse inputs or 2DoF game controllers until October 2016, when Oculus released the 6DoF controllers called Touch. These tracked controllers, also called “wands”, became a standard component of VR equipment, even for the mobile phone based HMDs since then. As HTC Vive was released with controllers, Sony’s PlayStation VR supports PlayStation Move controllers. Samsung started to ship Gear VR with a controller and Google Cardboards successor; Daydream is also bundled with a 6DoF controller.

Overall intuitiveness that controller is perceived to have is the controller naturalness [1]. Tracked controllers naturally map to hand motion, can be visually co-located with the real hands, providing proprioceptive and passive touch cues [2] which leads to higher sense of presence and an enhanced user experience. On the other hand, many developers continued releasing applications that offer other means of user input, mostly the handheld controllers besides the tracked controllers. While one of their motivations in providing handheld controller options was “legacy support” for the owners of early development kits without 6DoF controllers, another reason is based on their targeted-users’ habitations. Through years of use, gamers intuitively use game-controllers and became accustomed to these controls.

The purpose of this study to compare 6DoF tracked controllers and legacy controllers for virtual reality and provide information regarding important aspects of these controllers in virtual reality from users’ perspective.

II. Related Work

Several studies were conducted to investigate both quantitative performance and subjective preferences of users on different types of input devices within different systems [3,4,5,6,7]. Sportillo et al. [8] compared the user performance and subjective impressions for a realistic steering wheel and a pair of 6DoF controllers on a driving simulation experienced with a HMD. Their results suggest that users performed better using the realistic steering wheel setup in the driving simulation, while the subjective measures on physical comfort, realism, ease of use and ease of adaptation were also slightly higher for the steering wheel setup. These findings were similar with previous research on non-VR driving simulations [9]. Lee et al. [10] intended to compare 6DoF controllers with data gloves in a HMD action - adventure game but they did not publish any findings on user performance. Lindsey [11] compared a gamepad, an optical hand-tracking interface and the touchpad on the HMD for performance, presence, preference and enjoyment on a selection task in VR. In her study, game controller was most preferred controller and she suggested that the result was due to prior high game experience of participants. There were not significant differences between controller’s touchpad and game controller for performance measures, presence and enjoyment, but optical hand tracker yielded significantly poor scores, similar to the results provided in comparison of optical hand tracker to mouse and keyboard [12].

III. Methodology

A. Participants

3 male and 6 females, total of 36 participants, aged between 18 to 36 (M=25.33, SD=5.16) interacted with the stimuli using either a standard game controller or a pair of 6DoF wands. There were 18 participants on each group. Participants have been chosen from undergraduate and graduate game design students and VR enthusiasts. A modified version of Lifetime Television Exposure scale [13], which was adapted for gaming exposure, was applied to candidates. The question was modified as “During last 6 months, how often did you play a video game?” for “When you first wake/woke up in the morning?”, “During Lunchtime?”, “In the afternoon?”, “During dinnertime?”, “After dinner?”, “Late at night, before going to bed?”, During the day on Saturday?”, “On Saturday nights?”, “During the day on Sunday?”, “On Sunday nights?”, which can be answered within a 7 scale points from “Never” to “Almost Always”. Based on the t-test results, there was not a significant difference between the weekend, weekdays and overall gameplay frequency scores of the groups, which can be seen as follows in Table 1, suggesting that the participants in either of the groups can be considered similar in terms of their gaming experience.

B. Stimuli

Participants have played the game “I Expect You to Die”, which is an adventure game where users are required to solve puzzles by interacting with different objects in different ways. Users started with the tutorial and completed the first mission named “Friendly Skies”. The tutorial informs the player about the game controls. In the “Friendly Skies” mission scenario, player spawns in car loaded in an airplane. The puzzles require interacting with the objects such as a car key to ignite the car, a screwdriver to open a lid on the car console, a knife to cut the wires to deactivate a bomb, shooting a handgun and pushing several buttons in the car. Interacting with distant objects requires an interaction design patterns called telekinesis [14].

TABLE I. LIFETIME TELEVISION EXPOSURE RESULTS

Controller

N

Mean

Std. Dev.

Weekend Gameplay Frequency

6DoF Wand

18

4.875

1.15762

t(34)= -.4, p >.05

Game Controller

18

5.069

1.70812

Daily Gameplay Frequency

6DoF Wand

18

3.926

1.36389

t(34)= -.7, p >.05

Details

Pages
414
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9783631805220
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631805237
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631805244
ISBN (Softcover)
9783631802120
DOI
10.3726/b16279
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (December)
Keywords
computer graphics simulation animation visualization computer games
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 414 pp., 148 fig. b/w, 36 tables.

Biographical notes

Veysi İşler (Volume editor) Haşmet Gürçay (Volume editor) Hasan Kemal Süher (Volume editor) Güven Çatak (Volume editor)

Veysi İşler has been a tenured professor at the Department of Computer Engineering of Hasan Kalyoncu University, Turkey. His expertise covers a wide range of areas related to virtual worlds in computer systems. Haşmet Gürçay is professor at the Mathematics Department at the Hacettepe University, Turkey. His research interests include computer animation, visualization, computational geometry, and gaming. Hasan Kemal Süher was associate professor in the Advertising Department of Bahçeşehir University, Turkey. He has been the dean of the Communication Faculty and the head of the department of Advertising in Bahçeşehir University. Güven Çatak is an assistant professor of Game Design at the Communication Design Department of Bahçeşehir University, Turkey. His research areas are mainly gamification, game-based learning, game art, and design.

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