Gesture-based Games with the iPad

Proposer: James Gain

Abbreviation: iPadGame

Brief Description: Although research in touch-enabled interfaces has been conducted for decades, there has been a recent surge in the fidelity and affordablity of touch-enabled devices (iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Surface, etc.). This has implications for supporting everyday applications, such as web-surfing, e-mail, and, in particular, gaming.

This project will focus on multi-touch gesture recognition for games in the context of the new iPad device, which offers a larger touch-sensitive surface than previous smartphones and PDA’s. This will be undertaken through the development of a few (2-3) small-scale iPad games in varied genres (puzzle, arcade, RTS, etc), with an investigation of different styles of gesture input.

Computer Science Content: Human-Computer Interaction (multi-touch gesture recognition, playability testing), Computer Games (game design and development)

Specific Learning Outcomes: Conducting User Experiments, Iterative Game Development

Skills Required by Team as a Whole:

• Theory: easy to moderate [playability experiments and gesture interpretation]

• Implementation: moderate [XCode development, Objective C programming]

Facilities needed:

• Hardware: Apple compatible hardware (e.g., iMac), iPad

• Software: Xcode and iPad Development Environment

Supervision: James Gain, weekly meetings with supervisor, occassional attendance and presentation at research group meetings may be required.

Number of Students: 3 (2 will be tolerated but not encouraged)