Part 3: Shooting!

Here it comes… the part you have all been waiting for – Shooting!

For some reason – we are magnetized by the ability to fire projectiles – and the combination of that with violence is, well, explosive. But enough about crappy philosophy, shooting is an essential need for hard core gaming experiences, so let’s explore it a bit.

As briefly discussed in the opening post, the Kinect depth resolution does not allow it to track fingers reliably when the player is standing more than 2m away. For the discussion in this post, I will therefore assume we need to find other means to pull the trigger.

Some may argue that it’s totally unacceptable, and pulling the trigger with a finger is mandatory. In the fiction world of most action movies, the heroes tend spraying around bullets in automatic mode. In reality – of course – it is: A) Not efficient/accurate B) You will actually spray only if someone else carries your ammunition. 

Of course, games are more like the movies. Back in the old days, some joysticks even had an ‘auto-fire’ switch – to make it easier on the lazy gamer. My argument are: it might be acceptable to find alternative to finger trigger firing, and single finger squeeze - single shot is not a mandatory requirement for a non-casual games.

Let’s discuss several possible gestures for shooting and the implementation considerations:

Single hand pistol

To release the trigger, the user emulates the recoil/kickback effect of a pistol, 

• Since the same hand is used for aiming and triggering, this scheme will not allow accurate ranged attacks.
• The requirement from the algorithm to detect a back motion creates a notable delay
• The user needs to learn on the correct speed and length of a short motion. Since it is too short to enjoy intermediate feedback – user will probably suffer from exaggerated motion or missed gesture that might feel like an unresponsive gun (Not fun in scenes you are under fire…)
• It certainly puts too much the light on the finger tracking limitation

Dual hand pistol

Shooting a real pistol accurately requires two hand holding. For the triggering, we tried a scheme where the hand holding the handle aims, and bringing the 2^nd hand starts auto-firing.

In the movies, some westerns cowboys used the 2^nd hand to speed-up the hammer. This can also be emulated in gestures, by moving then 2^nd hand up/down or forward/backward behind the aiming hand.

While not obvious at first, there is a repeating problem in all those possibilities: which is related to the tracking technology. Users tend holding the aiming hand close to their body, and such poses are extremely challenging for many computer vision algorithms. Getting inaccurate aim is something you should expect and consider when choosing those schemes.

Dual hand Rifle

Rifles are much heavier then hand guns, and the natural shooting pose involve two hands: one to hold the rifle weight, usually near the far end of the gun, and another for squeezing the trigger. You can either fire when the user moves his trigger hand back and forth, or begin auto-fire when the 2^nd hand gets close to the trigger.

Compared to pistol shooting, the aiming hand is relatively far from the body – and thus reliably tracked

“To Infinity and beyond!”: The Buzz Light-year maneuver

Had he own a gun, Sheriff Woody would probably use the pistol scheme – but his life friend Buzz has a much more advanced laser, implanted directly above his forearm. For gesture gaming considerations, this scheme is quite successful because the aiming hand is always straight in a ‘vision friendly’ pose.

Buzz other abilities, such as foldable wings and rocket boosters; definitely cry for someone to create a gesture game, any volunteers?

AngryBotsNI implements the Buzz Light-year Laser scheme

Coming up next: The Clone Wars!

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