Testing and Data Collecting

So, at last I am ready to retrieve information on how users use the game and how easy or not it is to play with your face. I made some improvements in the paddle movement and in shadows so that now it is easier for you to know where the ball and paddle are and the paddle movement is more fluid.

How to + Tutorial
For this part I will need all of your help. How can you help me? Following these steps:

• Configure your computer as mentioned in "how to play the game" post;
• Open the game page at http://facepong.pt.vu;
• Register yourself or login, if you're already registered, by selecting the appropriate menu option in the main menu;
• Start Singleplayer or Multiplayer game, if you want to share the experience with a friend;
• Allow webcam usage so that you can control the paddle with your face;
• Press "Fix it" button so that the game knows the starting position of your face (this will affect the starting void area, area where no paddle movement will be observed);
• After you fix it you'll see a green elipse and a dot showing up near your nose;
• Once the dot is outside of the elipse the paddle will start moving.

Feel free to adjust options in the options menu before you start the game or after you finished one. Try out as many combinations as you want but please try to always use the webcam to play this game.

That is all, just have fun and send me some feedback.

P.S.- The AI is not that smart but please try to move the paddle as much as you can so I can see how good, or not, you are at playing this game.

Single Player Version ADDED!!

Ok, there is now a single player version available for you to test.

http://max.uma.pt/~a2037401

Try it out! ;)

Single Player Version

Since there aren't that many players online to play the game and recover stats, so, I'm working on a simple single player version with simple AI so that you can enjoy solo. I'll try to deliver it today.

Later on I will add a warning showing how many players are connected to the server so you can start a multiplayer game and wait for someone to join you.

That's all for now!

Server problems solved (I think...)

The problem was that the server was only accepting connections from the UMa LAN, because the policy file had an ip filter. I removed it and now everybody will be able to play the game. Still, you have to connect to the hamachi network for it to work.

Marilena Library Improved to detect tilted Objects

Marilena library is the way to do face detection in Actionscript. And it is a good library to start to do face detection or any other object detection based on haar features but it still didn't support the possibility of detecting tilted faces. There are several works that noticed the fault in the simple haar feature detection that was if a face was tilted the face wouldn't be detected, to improve this some work was done and the addition of new haar features was made. The problem here is that some calculations have to be done so that this tilted haar features can be detected. To solve this problem and since ActionScript allows really fast image transformations what I did was just add a simple function to Marilena that searches for tilted faces to a max of 45 degrees both positive and negative that allow to improve the face detection accuracy and robustness.

I leave you the link for my improved Marilena Library, http://www.mediafire.com/?tgddjo2mry2.

How to play the game?

If you want to try this game and you're not connected to UMa's LAN, you have to follow the following steps:

• Download this tool http://www.mediafire.com/?tmwaig3rgmi and install;
• When it is installed join the following network: FacePong with password:facepong
• After you joined that hamachi network go to http://max.uma.pt/~a2037401

Hopefully you'll be able to play the game. As I said in earlier posts it is best if you try it out with a friend.

UMa - Universidade da Madeira.

P.S.- After some tests I got to the conclusion that I will need a server outside my university for this to work corretly, if you know any that will let me install Red5. (this problem is now solved, you can play virtually anywhere in the globe)

Server Bug

Apparently the server was not connected to the Internet and as a result the game could not be played. Hopefully this problem is solved.

You should expect some bugs to happen.