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Analysis of Augmented Reality Games on Android platform Author Fekolkin Roman Year 2013 Student thesis, Bachelor, 15 HE Computer science Study Programme for a Degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Examiner: Julia Åhlen Supervisor: Peter Jenke Analysis of Augmented Reality Games on Android platform by Fekolkin Roman Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development University of Gävle S-801 76 Gävle, Sweden Email: [email protected] Abstract In this paper the research surrounding the Augmented Reality in games on Android platform was performed by testing 108 games from Google Play Market and by analyzing the hundreds of user reviews to determine the level of acceptance and the level of technical stability of the mobile games based on that technology. The Location-based, Marker-based and games based on somewhat different approach were studied and compared by the runtimes, game genres and by the featuring aspects including the presence of multiplayer mode, sound effects and the dimension that the virtual objects were positioned in. The overview of the studied games was presented in this paper. The results, for instance, include that the AR game variation is very narrow in terms of gameplay style and technical issues are very commonly encountered and it makes them very influential to the gameplay experience. The rareness of the multiplayer mode among the AR games was discovered meaning the domination of the single-player game designs. Contents 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Importance of the Study .................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Research Question ........................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Purpose of the Study ........................................................................................................ 2 1.4 Definition of the terms ..................................................................................................... 2 2 Related Work ........................................................................................................... 5 2.1 Overview ......................................................................................................................... 5 2.2 Games .............................................................................................................................. 7 2.3 Another less Game-Related Technique ......................................................................... 13 3 Method .................................................................................................................... 13 3.1 Overview ....................................................................................................................... 13 3.2 Hardware ....................................................................................................................... 14 3.3 Game’s Analysis ............................................................................................................ 14 3.4 User Studies ................................................................................................................... 16 4 Results ..................................................................................................................... 18 4.1 Result of Games’ Analysis ............................................................................................ 18 4.2 Result of User Studies ................................................................................................... 27 5 Discussion ............................................................................................................... 34 5.1 Discussion of the games tests’ results ........................................................................... 35 5.2 Discussion of the users’ reviews analysis ...................................................................... 37 5.3 Overview discussion ...................................................................................................... 39 6 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 40 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... 41 References .................................................................................................................. 41 Appendix 1: The data from the games’ analysis ..................................................... 44 Appendix 2: The result of the users reviews’ analysis ........................................... 48 1 Introduction Playing games has always been a significant part of the human evolution, as well as, a defining factor in behavioural qualifier of a person [10]. The industry of game development, similarly to film industry, has a cultural significance that may start to initialize it as new form of art. The sense of relaxation and refreshment of a person’s mind, as well as a teaching process, are all the possible outcomes that can be provided by a game session. The games offer an opportunity to relieve the stress of everyday life and to provide the sense of control over the situation where specific goals have to be achieved, by making decisions that actually result in something meaningful. The games can be roughly categorized into 3 clusters (figure 1) like sports, digital and board games. Each one of the clusters has different organizational structure, different groups of interest (audience) and different environmental specifications in which games can be performed. Figure 1: Three structural clusters of game types The industry of digital games has not done any particular steps towards improving the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since 1980s. It mostly depends on the unwillingness of the game companies to risk large budgets invested into the development due to the possibility of unsuccessful acceptance of the game on the market that would not pay off those investments. Augmented Reality is one of the new technologies that can provide a totally unique HCI by combining the strong sides of digital games and real world games. Before this technology can be widely used by the developers, it has to be proved to have stability, with defined possible limitations and the infrastructure used for building the AR system available to developers. It should also be understandable, in what way the AR technology can be used to become a part of the game process. The game design is a tricky procedure, so sometimes it is difficult to understand the best way of using the technology creatively and appropriately. The gameplay strongly depends on that aspect. Another important thing is the accessibility of the hardware, allowing playing the actual game, for the target audience. Without the proper accessibility the game risks to be a commercial failure. 1.1 Importance of the Study The proper research of AR started in 90s [3], it has a lot of uncovered potential of further expending the interactivity experience, bringing it to a whole new, deeper level, offering a more vivid sense of presence than ever before [5]. It’s a very rapidly growing technology which can be considered as another step deeper into the age of the progressive digital inventions. The games that are based on the Augmented Reality can be used for both entertainment and educational [8] purposes, thus there are many ways of creating really worthy games using creativity to find out the innovative ways 1 of applying this technology. When the study of the Augmented Reality started to grow, initially the games based on AR would require expensive equipment that made the created games not commercially advantageous. But, as the technology developed, the equipment became more available for the broader audience and thus the development of the AR games became more and more attractive for the independent developers [39]. The technological progress makes the ways of implementation and application of AR to become broader, due to the minimization of technical limitations and increase in the variety of the hardware to be used for inventive AR ideas to be realized. Due to the current availability and the strengthened positions of the AR based games on the market, it would be interesting to take a closer look at how the technology can be used to provide AR based interactivity in the games and to see if it offers any perspective in creating a any new perception of the gaming experience for the players. According to the prognosis from analytics from Juniper Research [24], the share of AR games compared to other areas of AR application (medicine, education etc) will increase up to ¼ of the whole market before year 2015. The analytics from Semico [1] explained in their latest report the role of AR on the market and they stated that AR games will be in popular demand due to rapid increase in technology development. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle in emerging technologies[17], the AR technology is at the stage of increased expectations which means there will be a lot of different applications, both successful and not. Thus, it would be enlightening to research how the AR behaves in the game industry and what kind of game applications are available on the market right now and how well they are accepted by the audience. 1.2 Research Question How is the Augmented Reality used in games on the Android platform?