Target-shooting exergame with a hand gesture control

Abstract

Exertion games (exergames) pose interesting challenges in terms of user interaction techniques. Players are commonly unable to use traditional input devices such as mouse and keyboard, given the body movement requirements of this type of videogames. In this work we propose a hand gesture interface to direct actions in a target-shooting exertion game that is played while exercising on an ergo-bike. A vision-based hand gesture interface for interacting with objects in a 3D videogame is designed and implemented. The system is capable to issue game commands to any computer game that normally responds to mouse and keyboard without modifying the underlying source code of the game. The vision system combines Bag-of-features and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to achieve user-independent and real-time hand gesture recognition. In particular, a Finite State Machine (FSM) is used to build the grammar that generates gesture commands for the game. We carried out a user study to gather feedback from participants, and our preliminary results show the high level of interest from users use this multimedia system that implements a natural way of interaction. Albeit some concerns in terms of comfort, users had a positive experience using our exertion game and they expressed their positive intention to use a system like this in their daily lives.