Augmented galaga on mobile devices

Abstract

Recently, research on augmented games as a new game genre has attracted a lot of attention. An augmented game overlaps virtual objects in an augmented reality(AR) environment, allowing users to interact with the AR environment through manipulating real and virtual objects. However, it is difficult to release existing augmented games to ordinary gamers, as the games generally use very expensive and inconvenient 'backpack' systems. Accordingly, this paper introduces an augmented game, called augmented galaga based on traditional well-known galaga, executed on mobile devices to make game players experience the game without any economic burdens. Augmented galaga uses real space, such as a room, as game environment, and covers the real wide-space with a small screen of mobile devices by actually moving the mobile devices. In an initial stage, the specific objects are selected by game players, and are automatically recognized by scale-invariant features in playing a game. Then, virtual insect-like aliens randomly appear in several specific regions displayed on the mobile screen, and game players attack it by moving the mobile devices towards specific regions with virtual aliens and clicking a button of mobile devices. As a result, we expect that augmented galaga provides an exciting experience without any economic burdens for players based on the game paradigm, where the user interacts with both the physical world captured by a mobile camera and the virtual aliens automatically generated by a mobile device. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.