A robust throw detection library for mobile games

Current smartphones offer more and more computational capabilities and powerful sensors, much of which remains under-utilized for most of the time. There is an increasing conviction that this potential can open up a whole new area of mobile entertainment. To contribute to this, we implemented a variety of throw detection methods that make use of the accelerometer present within most smartphones, and investigated them in order to (i) detect relevant key points in the device’s trajectory and (ii) reliably calculate the throw height achieved. From this research, we selected the most robust and precise algorithm, and packed it in a general purpose library that can be used in all sorts of mobile applications. In this interactive technical demo, we describe in some detail the algorithm and its testing process. Finally, to illustrate the potential and usefulness of this library, we briefly describe its application in Catchy, a new mobile game of which the gameplay is based on detecting when, and possibly how high, you throw your mobile phone in the air. It provides several single- and multi-player mini-games, in which the player has to reach certain goals throwing the device. To the best of our knowledge, Catchy’s gameplay illustrates a novel way of interaction and entertainment using a popular device of daily use.

@InProceedings { RHKB13a,
  author       = "Rijnboutt, Eric and Hokke, Olivier and Kooij, Robert and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "A robust throw detection library for mobile games",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of FDG 2013 - Eighth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "may",
  year         = "2013",
  address      = "Chania, Crete, Greece",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2013/RHKB13a"
}