Bidirectional Interplay between Tracking and the Rider Simulator and Its Application to Snowboarding

Physical interactive games are recently hogging the limelight in the international game market, as they adopt a new concept of input devices that allows the players to interact and play with the games using their own bodies instead of hand-operated input devices. Since the concept is still tethered to a screen-based output, its feedback part is not as fluid and natural as its input part. This paper proposes a novel concept for a new gaming experience based on a bidirectional user interface wherein a user's body motion as a control input and physical/visual feedback from output devices interact with each other. The physical feedback is a means of providing a physical response to a player, and can be the output of game contents and/or responses or effects from the control input. To provide physical feedback, the proposed interface uses a rider simulator as the output device. Then a user-device control loop between the control input and output devices is created, which may result in a divergent feedback and eventually, dangerous circumstances that can lead to serious injury. Therefore, the proposed interface introduces an energy bounding algorithm to guarantee stable and safe game play, even if the game players stand on the simulator to play the game and take the feedback. A pilot user study was performed to analyze the performance of this algorithm and to verify how easily and effectively users enjoy the system, and the study showed that the proposed interface can provide an exciting experience for players on the basis of a new type of interface whereby they play with physical interactive games on the rider simulator.