SpaceHopper

Large interactive floor displays introduce human-centric challenges for application designers. In particular, little is understood about how to compensate for a first-person, 3-D visual perspective immersed within a 2D display.

To explore this, we developed a game called SpaceHopper. Players pilot a hopper ball spaceship in a life-sized, floor-projected game of Asteroids. Asteroids are projected on the ground around the player, and players can rotate and bounce to anywhere on the play area. In one variant, play closely mimics the classic 80’s videogame Asteroids: each bounce of the hopper ball causes the spaceship to fire. In another variant, bounces are mapped to a gravity-repulsing wave, clearing the area around the ship of asteroids.

The research explores the impact of game attributes on game performance and player assessment of control, game state awareness, and "naturalness". The game attributes that we consider are:
• Compensation for first-person visual perspective (A): the two game variants map the act of bouncing to either a game event that is unidirectional (firing), or omnidirectional (bouncing causing a ripple or wave).
• Compensation for first-person visual perspective (B): in the standard game of asteroids the game is viewed from a top-down or “god’s eye” perspective in which all asteroids are presented in the same relative size regardless of their distance from the ship. In a first-person perspective, asteroids that are further away appear smaller in the player’s field of view. In some conditions we warp the relative size of asteroids so that they all appear to have the same relative size regardless of their distance from the player.

SpaceHopper was exhibited as part of Nocturne:Art at Night 2016, October 15th 6pm-midnight, on the Halifax Waterfront