Just thought i would showoff the result of our recently completed bachelor thesis. As i am sure all of you know multi-touch is becoming more and more popular these days and will hopefully soon be everywhere. So like any other good interface it needs its games. So what we wanted to do was create a game that used the strengths, or affordances, of multi-touch tabletop interfaces inorder to determine what the affects of such a game would be on player experience. What we created was Oculusia, a four player collaborative game.
The game
The game has been titled “Oculusia” since all the creatures inhabiting the underwater game world only has one eye that follows actions in the game. The premise of the game is to defend sea sponges along the sides of the table against shots from a prowling sea creature referred to as the Boss. The Boss is moving around the centre of the table shooting in all directions and performing devastating special attacks.
To defend the sea sponges, a player has a defence pad to intercept shots not only from the boss, but also missed shots from the players on the other sides. To take down the boss and win the game‚ players must launch sharp spiked sea urchins. The game is lost if a shot travels through a breached sea sponge wall. This means that players have to collaborate with not only taking down the boss, but also with not shooting each others sea sponges.
This video will hopefully add more sense to above description.
It is also worth mentioning that we did our own image processing via OpenCV, so our own coordinate corection, finger labeling, everything. But we would like to thank you guys alot for invaluable help in making our FTIR table work. The whole thing took approxapatly a month to make and the game itself took one week using XNA.
