Mobile Games with Touch and Indirect Sensor Control

Abstract

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 tiltinteraction 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.