MagiEntertain: MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT INTERACTION BASED ON MAGNETIC FIELD

For an enjoyable and fun mobile entertainment software, the user interface need to be usable, convenient, and reliable; and the input controllers needs to be natural, intuitive and provide fast feedback on user's actions. In mobile context, most of entertainment applications currently use number pad, keypad, touch screen as input interaction modalities and devices are generally used in outdoors with different noise conditions and interruptions. In addition to that, most of the games require complex interactions and high degree of collaboration between input controllers; thus, users often have difficulties on concentrating long play sessions while trying to perform multiple commands simultaneously using the touch screen. For that reason, there exist couple of mobile phone peripherals for external input to enrich the user interaction; however, they diminish the portability of these devices. In this work, we present a new technique for interaction with mobile entertainment software based on using magnetic field sensor integrated in mobile devices where a properly shaped permanent magnet is used for interaction. Our method provides a powerful interaction technique for mobile entertainment and it can be used both as a simple motion controller, as well as an intelligent gesture recognizer; therefore, enable players to input larger number of commands simultaneously, and enhance the playability and the entertainment. The proposed method is consistent with most of usability and playability heuristics defined for mobile games and other mobile entertainment applications.