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.

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.

A Trial Version for You

After some tests done in the last weeks I decided to drop off a link so you can test the game for yourself.

Minimun Requisites:
A computer with at max 3 years old with a webcam attached to it.

Best Requisites:
Any computer 1-2 years old and a webcam.

It is best if you try and play with a friend because, most likely, there will be no one in the server.
The link is, http://max.uma.pt/~a2037401.

Test it out and leave your comments please.

Improve Frames per Second (FPS)

When trying to study the performance of the game I came across a problem. In my laptop, a 1,73 GHz Centrino with 1GB of RAM, i could only perform 5fps, this means that the image would not have a flow instead it would jump from frame to frame.

To solve this problem, partly, I used a feature that comes with Actionscript 3 which lets you know how much movement is the camera registering. So, what I did was to try to detect a face when motion was detected above a certain level. This improved performance, boosting the fps to an average of 15-20 when face detection was done but brought another problems, one was the light levels, when in a poor lit room movement could not be perceived in a efficient way and also the background color problem started to appear.

In conclusion, though the fps were improved the face detection became poor not letting the user have good control of the paddle. The difficulty here is to combine the two technologies so that they can work effectively together and have a better performance when compared to the usage of them separately.

I decided to upload a few pictures related to the paddle movement and some shadow effects that were created to help the user know the position of the ball and paddle in the 3D space.

The following were taken with one client running:

Fig. 1- In this picture the face is centered inside the circle so the paddle isn't going to move

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

As you can see, in Fig. 6, when the paddle comes closer to the ground a shadow starts to appear. This lets the user know if he's too close to the ground and also aids to know if he is in the same height as the ball or not. Also, in Fig.5, you can see that there is no shadow this was done to increase the level of difficulty and so it becomes more realistic. The shadow starts to fade when the user's paddle is closer to the ceiling of the game space.

Another thing added to improve the user experience is the arrows that light up to show where the paddle will move. This was done so that the user doesn't have to look to the video feed to know where he is. This way he can concentrate exclusively in trying to hit the ball.

Since this is a multiplayer game I'll add more pictures and videos regarding multiplayer gaming experiences.

Presentation

Since October 2008 I've been trying to develop a video based interactive game that enhances user experience and adds this new way of interaction.

Since then I've made a lot of research and got to the point where I started to develop a 3D multiplayer ping pong net game using ActionScript 3, MariLena Library and Adobe AIR technologies. To merge all of those together I use a tool, FlashDevelop, for the client side. For the server side I use Red5 along side with MySQL.

I tried to make it run with the most fps possible since it uses face detection and tracking as the input to the players paddle movement. I also tried to improve user experience, thing that has been left aside in other works.

Hopefully, the next post will have some pictures and videos of it working, and I'll try to make an available version for you to try it out.