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Activate your GAIM: a toolkit for input in active games

Published: 06 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Active games are video games that involve physical activity. Interaction in active games is captured via a variety of input devices such as accelerometers, cameras, pressure sensors and exercise equipment. It is difficult for programmers to deal with this profusion of devices, leading most active games to be tied to a particular hardware platform. In this paper, we introduce the GAIM toolkit. GAIM simplifies input handling in active games through a high-level API that abstracts the details of individual devices. This allows developers to write code independently of the input devices used, allows the toolkit to dynamically adapt to the devices a player has available, and allows people with different hardware to play together. We illustrate the approach through two active games developed using the GAIM toolkit.

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  • (2023)Exergames: Proposal for a gamepad to sense player movementsJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.24215/16666038.23.e1023:2(e10)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
  • (2017)Nudging and shoving: Using in-game cues to guide player exertion in exergamesEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2017.01.00219(83-100)Online publication date: Mar-2017
  • (2016)Thighrim and Calf-LifeProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858406(2681-2692)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
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cover image ACM Other conferences
Futureplay '10: Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology
May 2010
282 pages
ISBN:9781450302357
DOI:10.1145/1920778
  • Conference Chairs:
  • Bill Kapralos,
  • Andrew Hogue,
  • Simon Xu
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Algoma University College

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 May 2010

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Author Tags

  1. active video game
  2. exergame
  3. game development toolkit

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Futureplay '10
Sponsor:
Futureplay '10: Futureplay '10 @ GDC Canada
May 6 - 7, 2010
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Exergames: Proposal for a gamepad to sense player movementsJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.24215/16666038.23.e1023:2(e10)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
  • (2017)Nudging and shoving: Using in-game cues to guide player exertion in exergamesEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2017.01.00219(83-100)Online publication date: Mar-2017
  • (2016)Thighrim and Calf-LifeProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858406(2681-2692)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
  • (2013)Real-time gait classification for persuasive smartphone appsProceedings of the 2013 international conference on Intelligent user interfaces10.1145/2449396.2449418(161-172)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2013
  • (2011)Virtual sensorsProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/2037373.2037378(25-28)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2011
  • (2011)The promise of exergames as tools to measure physical healthEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2011.03.0082:1(17-21)Online publication date: Jan-2011

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