MSQUASH

An Exergame using the Playstation Move Controller

Mauro F. M. Ferr

, Kelly O’Hara

and Frutuoso G. M. Silva

University of Beira Interior, Covilh

a, Portugal

Instituto de Telecomunicac¸

oes, University of Beira Interior, Covilh

a, Portugal

Keywords:

Gestural Interaction, Exergames, Move Motion Controller, Squash.

Abstract:

The exergames became very popular in last years because of the appearance of the motion controllers with

accelerometers but also because this type of games promotes the physical exercise.

Msquash is a 3D game that simulates a squash ﬁeld where the player can play using the Move controller. The

game was developed with the objective to create an exergame using the Move motion controller and also to

compare the Move controller performance with Wii Remote. Thus the idea is providing a fun and engaging

experience for players while they do physical exercise also.

The Msquash game was developed using OGRE and OpenCV libraries with Playstation Move controller and

Playstation eye camera.

This paper presents a brief description of the Msquash game and some results based on tests performed with

users to evaluate the interaction method used and its gameplay.

1 INTRODUCTION

In last years, the games consoles brought to players

several exergames (Hoysniemi, 2006) (Sinclair et al.,

2009), where Wii game console is a reference with

games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit (Wii, 2011). How-

ever, the other game consoles go in the same direction

with Playstation Move (Playstation Move, 2011) and

Microsoft Kinect (Kinect, 2011) controllers.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques

have evolved over the last years, which brought ben-

eﬁts to the video game industry. The appearances

of motion controllers like the Wii Remote and the

Playstation Move are examples of this evolution.

These controllers allow the mapping of the player’s

gestures to the games, which is very useful and ex-

plored in several types of games. One type of video

games that beneﬁts a lot from this evolution were the

exergames, i.e. video games that promote physical

exercise. As the name suggests, exergames are games

that motivate players to do exercise routines. They

usually require that the players perform movements,

in order to complete goals. They can also be consid-

ered Serious Games, since they use the video game

to achieve other goals than solely entertainment, i.e.

do physical exercise. For example, the Wii console is

used to augment the rehabilitation of an adolescent

with cerebral palsy (Deutsch et al., 2008).

Bailey and McInnis (Bailey and McInnis, 2011)

showed in their study that the players spend more en-

ergy in exergaming than when walking on a treadmill

at 4,8 kilometers per hour. All games used in their

study elevated energy expenditure to moderate or vig-

orous intensity. They claim that exergaming has the

potential to increase physical activity and may be a vi-

able alternative to traditional ﬁtness activities for chil-

dren.

The exergames can have a positive effects on

health of the players, for that, this type of games

have been growing in last years and it will continue to

growing in next years. However, some of them have a

problem that can potentially can cause injury to play-

ers, because the movements of the players don’t have

an opposite force. For example, in a tennis game the

user uses a racket to play (e.g. using a Wii remote) but

it don’t have the opposite force created by the ball in

the racket. This is a problem for which current tech-

nology has no solution yet.

Several works has been developed trying to eval-

uate the virtual environments for games. Takamura

et al. (Takamura et al., 2006) showed that game con-

struction with high reality is attained by integrating

rigid body physics, haptic feedback and stereophonic

sound system. Bideau et al. (Bideau et al., 2003) show

480

F. M. Ferrão M., O’Hara K. and G. M. Silva F..

MSQUASH - An Exergame using the Playstation Move Controller.

DOI: 10.5220/0003916304800484

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP-2012), pages 480-484

ISBN: 978-989-8565-02-0

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Figure 1: Msquash - the two modes available.

that the virtual environment offered enough realism to

initiate natural gestures, i.e. that gestures did not dif-

fer between the real and virtual environment.

In this paper we describe the Msquash game that

is a new exergame that simulates a squash ﬁeld where

the player can play using the Move controller. The

main idea was to develop an exergame using the Move

controller and compare the performance of the Move

controller and Wii Remote. Besides it allows us

evaluating the performance of the players during the

game because it produces a report with most impor-

tant events of the game for each player. This aspect is

important to analyze the performance of the players.

For example, in a recent work, Bideau et al. (Bideau

et al., 2010) used a motion capture system and a vir-

tual reality system to analyze also sports performance.

2 MSQUASH

Msquash is an exergame that was created to study

the capabilities of this type of video games us-

ing the Playstation Move controller for user inter-

action. It was built using the 3D rendering en-

gine OGRE (OGRE 3D, 2001) plus the OpenCV li-

brary (Bradski, 2000) to make the tracking of the

Move command. The tracking process is based on

the color of the ball on the top of the Move command.

Currently, Msquash is composed by two modes of

game but only available for a single player yet. In

the ﬁrst mode, called normal mode, the player has a

squash ﬁled and uses the Move command to control

the racket. In the second mode, called target mode, as

the name indicates the player has to hit the target to

achieve the goal. Figure 1 shows the two modes of

the game that the player can select, in the beginning of

the game, by pressing one of the buttons of the Move

Figure 2: Msquash - normal and target modes.

command (i.e. the square or the triangle).

In the normal mode (see Figure 2 top) the player

makes points depending on the area where the ball

hits. This means that he/she achieves more points

when the ball hits between the two red lines in the

wall and achieves less points when the ball hits above

or below the area deﬁned by two red lines. In the be-

ginning of the game the user also deﬁnes the number

of balls that want to play.

To make the game more attractive was also de-

ﬁned a difﬁculty level. In this case was deﬁned four

difﬁculty levels. The difﬁculty level is associated to

the dimension of the racket of the user. For exam-

ple, the level one corresponds to a larger racket that

in the levels two, three or four. Thus, the level four

corresponds to the smaller racket which make more

difﬁcult to catch the ball. However the racket size

only changes for collision detection but its graphical

representation is maintained in all levels. This means

that the player needs more accuracy with the Move

controller for level four than for levels three, two or

one. For collision detection was developed a module

that calculates the ball interaction with the racket and

with the squash ﬁeld. This module takes into account

the gravity force and the acceleration of the ball re-

trieved by the accelerometers of the Move controller.

During the game is created a report with several

kinds of informations, such as, the number of lost

MSQUASH - An Exergame using the Playstation Move Controller

481

balls, the areas where he/she lost the balls, the points

achieved, the time played per ball, the difﬁculty level,

etc.. This information is very useful to analyze the

player’s performance.

The target mode (see Figure 2 bottom) was devel-

oped to increase the challenge of the game. In this

case, a target appears randomly in the wall, and every

time the player hits it, it will appear in a new position.

The player makes points depending on the area where

the ball hits the target, of course that the center gives

more points than in boundary.

To evaluate the interaction method of the game

were realized tests with several players and were gen-

erated data about the players’ performance in the

game. The players also had to answer to a ques-

tionnaire, after playing the game, to obtain its opin-

ions about the game and about the interaction method

used. This questionnaire was created using Likert

scale (Likert, 1932) with ﬁve-levels. Thus, game’s

evaluation combines data from the player perfor-

mance with the questionnaire answered after playing

the game with the aim of collecting player’s opinion

about the game and its gameplay.

The tests was applied to 67 users, ages between

11 to 67 years (male = 45 and female = 22). The

sample was divided in three groups: group A - pupils

from a secondary school (32); group B - undergrad-

uate Sports Science students (23); and group C in-

cludes a wide range of people that wanted participate

in the tests (11). Note that the two main groups, A and

B, represent the target audience of this kind of games.

In tests was used two laptop computers, each one

with a Move controller and a Playstation Eye camera.

Note that the use of laptop computers in these tests

may be inﬂuenced the results due to the reduced sized

of screens. However these tests gave us the ﬁrst feed-

back about the game and the interaction method used.

But we think that the user’s performance can be better

using a wide screen.

Figure 3 shows the two test sessions with two stu-

dents playing simultaneously as a way to improve the

competitiveness. The tests consisted of three sessions,

one initial of 5 minutes to training without points, and

then two sessions, one for each game mode, where

the player had available 15 balls per session. The

ﬁrst session was created for the user’s adaptation. The

other two sessions were evaluated in terms of points

obtained, balls loosed, time of game, etc. After the

three sessions each player answered to the question-

naire giving their opinion about the game and its in-

teraction method.

The main positive aspects referred by users about

the game were the fact that it promotes the physical

exercise and also the interaction method used (i.e. the

Figure 3: Msquash - user tests with two main groups.

Move controller). On the other hand, the main nega-

tive aspects identiﬁed by users were some difﬁculty to

perceive the velocity/distance of the ball to the racket.

Based on feedback from users we can say that the

main objective of the game was obtained, although

still being a ﬁrst version of the game for a single

player. The deﬁnition of a difﬁculty level had good

results in practice because the tests showed that users

obtain more points in ﬁrst level than in other levels,

as we can see in Figure 4 (top) that presents the aver-

age points per difﬁculty level. Besides the difference

of points between levels is more signiﬁcant in target

mode than in normal mode, as expected.

The tests showed also that the users maintain nor-

mally the ball in area above the two red lines. This

fact can be observed in Figure 4 (bottom) where is

showed the average of the points obtained for each

area of the ﬁeld.

When comparing the performance of Move con-

troller in this game with Wii Remote controller, we

can say that in terms of accelerometers they are sim-

ilar. The main difference between both controllers is

the tracking method used for each one. In the case of

Move controller the tracking is based on image pro-

cessing captured from Playstation Eye camera. Our

tests showed that the tracking process is inﬂuenced by

the hardware characteristics, that means that the game

performance can be also inﬂuenced. For example, in

our tests the two laptops used were not equal and the

GRAPP 2012 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications

482

Normal mode Target mode

Level 0 89,5 290

Level 1 61,03 152,2

Level 2 49,65 147,61

Level 3 32,5 37,5

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4

Normal mode 89,5 61,03 49,65 32,5

Target mode 290 152,2 147,61 37,5

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Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4

Normal mode 89,5 61,03 49,65 32,5

Target mode 290 152,2 147,61 37,5

Above Middle Below

Normal mode 20,06 12,93 10,9

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Figure 4: Top - average points per mode and level of difﬁ-

culty. Bottom - average points per area in normal mode.

gameplay was not exactly the same.

3 CONCLUSIONS

We developed a 3D game using the Playstation Move

motion controller and Eye camera. The Msquash is an

exergame because it promotes the physical exercise

where the users’ gestures are used to manipulate the

racket (i.e. to play). Our game has the advantage to

give us a report for each user about its performance in

the game. Thus it is more easy evaluate the game and

at the same time develop new experiences.

The users tests showed us that in fact this type of

motion controllers is very efﬁcient, and also that any-

one can use it independently of the age. Other in-

teresting result was that the hand, used to play, has

no inﬂuence on loose balls, i.e. the players lost balls

equally on the left and right side, independently of

the hand used to play. The level of difﬁculty created

for the game worked as expected, i.e., players’ scores

decrease when the difﬁculty level increases.

When comparing the results of the two main

groups, we seen that undergraduate students of Sports

achieved better scores than other pupils. All par-

ticipants considered that this kind of games can be

positive effects on health of the players. But only

the undergraduate students reported the problem of

the movements of the players don’t have an opposite

force, which can cause injury to players. In addition,

they mentioned a new problem that can arise for their

career. They think that exergaming can replace them

as physical trainers because the people can do the ex-

ercise alone at home.

In the future we want to extend the game for two

players, which is not a complicated task because the

Move controller can emit several colors, thus it is easy

to do the tracking for them. So, in this case each

player will have a different color and the screen will

be divided in two areas, one for each player. Other

idea for the future is develop a version of the game

using Kinect controller to evaluate the main advan-

tages and disadvantages when compared to the mo-

tion controllers with accelerometers. Besides will be

interesting make a study to evaluate the energy ex-

pended during the game, because the squash game is

considered an vigorous game.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Instituto de Telecomunicac¸

oes (IT) for supporting

the necessary equipment for the development of this

project. Thanks to all users that participate in tests of

the game.

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