About this project:

Investigating how scrolling cameras can work in iPad game with tangible widgets.

This was my Master Thesis project at Medialogy. My group decided to look into the toys-to-life genre that tries to blur the line between the digital and physical world. More specifically, we looked into Disney AppMATes, which is an iPad game for children.

In the game, players use a “tangible widget” toy car to move around on the iPad screen. However, there is a mismatch between physical and virtual affordances, since children often kept pushing the widget too close to the physical screen edges, which makes it difficult for the iPad to detect the widget. We decided to investigate this area and try to come up with solutions that would motivate children to keep the widget in the center of the screen.

Thesis abstract:
Tangible widgets have been used in the context of touch-based games for children where widgets represent game avatars that players control with the widget. Due to a lack of prior research in this field, this thesis investigates problems based on an initial study where children played the game Disney AppMATes, which uses a scrolling camera. In this game, players control a virtual car using a widget. In the initial study, it was found that children had a desire to drive on roads. However, roads were often difficult to drive on because of the view of the scrolling camera. This thesis proposes a range of solutions to the problems found in the initial study, but focuses on the above-mentioned problem for which a solution called Road Focus was designed. Through an experiment with 64 participants in ages 5-7, it was found that Road Focus is a significant improvement to the solution used in AppMATes.

Credits
Benjamin Nicholas Overgaard
Gustav Dahl
Mathias Klitgaard Berthelsen