Interfacing assessment using facial expression recognition

One of the most important issues in gaming is deciding about the employed interfacing technology. Gamepad has traditionally been a popular interfacing technology for the gaming industry, but, recently motion controlled interfacing has been used widely in this industry. This is exactly the purpose of this paper to study whether the motion controlled interface is a feasible alternative to the gamepad, when evaluated from a user experience point of view. To do so, a custom game has been developed and 25 test subjects have been asked to play the game using both types of interfaces. To evaluate the users experiences during the game, their hedonic and pragmatic quality are assessed using both subjective and objective evaluation methods in order to crossvalidate the obtained results. An application of computer vision, facial expression recognition, has been used as a non-obtrusive objective and hedonic measure. While, the score obtained by the user during the game has been used as a pragmatic quality measure. The use of facial expression recognition has, to the best of our knowledge, not been used before to assess the hedonic quality of interfaces for games. The thorough experimental results show that the user experience of the motion controlled interface is significantly better than the gamepad interface, both in terms of hedonic and pragmatic quality. The facial expression recognition system proved to be a useful non-obtrusive way to objectively evaluate the hedonic quality of the interfacing technologies.