Mobile Motion Gaming: Enabling a New Class of Phone-to-Phone Action Games on Commodity Phones

Mobile gaming is a big driver of app marketplaces. However, few mobile games deliver truly distinctive gameplay experiences for ad hoc collocated users. As an example of such an experience, consider a sword fight dual between two users facing each other where each user's phone simulates a sword. With phone in hand, the users' thrusts and blocks translate to attacks and counterattacks in the game. Such Phone-to-Phone Mobile Motion Games (MMG) represent interesting and novel gameplay for ad hoc users in the same location. One enabler for an MMG game like sword fight is continuous, accurate distance ranging. Existing ranging schemes cannot meet the stringent requirements of MMG games: speed, accuracy, and noise robustness. In this work, we design FAR, a new ranging scheme that can localize at 12 Hz with 2-cm median error while withstanding up to 0-dB noise, multipath, and Doppler effect issues. Our implementation runs on commodity smartphones and does not require any external infrastructure. Moreover, distance measurement accuracy is comparable to that of Kinect, a fixed-infrastructure motion capture system. Evaluation on users playing two prototype games indicate that FAR can fully support dynamic game motion in real time.