WELCOME
TO MARBALL
Have you ever played the game labyrinth? Marball takes inspiration from this game but builds upon it to add more elements of interaction in a mix of physical and virtual gameplay. Marball is a game created by a group of five students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology during two months in the course DH2413 Advanced Graphics and Interaction.
Goal & Motivation
Before deciding on our what to do for our project, we spent a lot of time trying to come up with the best idea. We figured out pretty quickly that we wanted to make a game that uses the Pixelsense. To us, the Pixelsense was interesting because it combined physical interaction with digital interaction very nicely. When we came up with the idea for Marball, we all liked it because it used the phycons in a way that couldn't be replicated with a mouse and keyboard.
Throughout the project, our main goal was to make a game that was fun to interact with. So, our team prioritized the interaction the most. We even made a balancing mechanic where the user tilts the pixelsense to get the ball to roll, in adition to using the phycons to help the ball move.
Ofcourse, we still wanted to have nice graphics too. Since the Pixelsense is pretty old, it was dificult to get astonishing graphics, but we found ways to still make the game visually intersesting by having many self made models on the levels and having cool camera movement.
Explanation & Justification
Graphics
Creating a beautiful experience is difficult when limited with a top down view on low-end hardware. We managed to make our game graphically interesting by creating over a 100 unique models and adding interesting interactions. When a level is completed, an magnificent camera transition is shown to introduce the next level. Furtermore, We added beautiful and helpful particle effects to some of our objects.
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Interaction
We have done a lot of interesting and exciting ways of interaction for our game. The most noticeable is that we put our device on a swivelling platform. The use of leaning the table is changing the gravity in the game, to move the ball. This is intuitive and unique way of moving the ball. Besides the tilting, we are using physical icons that can be placed and moved on our screen. This results in our game being a very a very tangible experience, unlike most video games.
Challenges & Obstacles
One of the main challenges we had was the communication between the externals and the table. These include the external phone running the gyroscopic sensor as well as the detection and interaction with the phycons using TUIO. Another challenge was getting the tilt feature to feel intuitive and efficient. It was also changed so that instead of the entire world rotating only shadows and gravity changed with tilt. These factors were tweaked and improved with each feedback session.
Lessons Learned
Some of the lessons learned include working with older technology, communication as well as interaction with users. The PixelSense Table was the main technology used in the project. It was 15 years old and ran niche software to utilize infrared detection. The challenge which this prompted brought with it some lessons learned. Here communication with the phycons and external phone application was key, which also included app creation and communication between android and its old version of windows. When it came to the interaction with users, this incorporated both obtaining interactions with playtesters and how the users interacted with the Marball game. Learning from testers how they interact gave way to developing the most intuitive way to interact with our project.
Related Work
[1] In this report from 2019 they investigated the effects of playing board games on various cognitive functions. These studies used Go, chess, and Ska, which are not educational games but abstract strategy games. The study found that board games have numerous positive effects, such as increased physical activity and reduced anxiety. It also showed enhanced interpersonal interactions and motivation of participants. This is relevant to us as we’ve built something that’s very similar to a board game, while it’s not physical in its entirety, we have numerous physical elements, and it’s very positive that creating a physical experience can alleviate some negatives when it comes to playing a game in a public space for example.
[2] This article is about creating a large interactive map over MIT, on a similar table to the interactive tables that we plan to use. This project is relevant because they 3d-printed every building on the MIT campus, and made them all interact with the table via touch pads, not much unlike the method we used for our phycons. We drew some inspiration from this project when we designed our phycon models for 3d-printing.
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[1] The effectiveness of intervention with board games: a systematic review.
Noda, S., Shirotsuki, K. & Nakao, M. 2019
[2] A 3-dimensional tangible mapping and data visualization interface for MIT campus. Dishaan D. 2016