Sound Specific Vibration Interface for Enhancing Reality in Computer Games

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a sound-specific vibration interface and its evaluation results by playing three commercial games with the interface. The proposed interface complements the pitfalls of existing frequency-based vibration interfaces such as vibrating headsets, mouses, and joysticks. Those interfaces may bring negative user experiences by generating incessant vibrations because they vibrate in response to certain sound frequencies. But the proposed interface which responds to only target sounds can improve user experiences effectively. The hardware and software parts of the interface are described; the structure and the implementation of a wrist pad that delivers vibration are discussed. Furthermore, we explain a sound-matching algorithm that extracts sound characteristics and a GUI-based pattern editor that helps users to design vibration patterns. The results from evaluating the performance show that the success ratio of the sound matching is over 90% at the volume of 20dB and the delay time is around 400msec. In the survey about user experiences, the users evaluates that the interface is more than four times effective in improving the reality of game playing than without using the vibration interfaces, and two times than the frequency-based ones.