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FruitSalad II

Tangible Interface Game

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Schrader Participants: Alma Salim, Soenke Dohrn, Wendy Ann Mansilla Subjects: Pervasive Gaming, Tangible Interfaces

Nowadays, more advanced multimedia and feedback tools and assistive technologies enable enhanced gaming experiences. However, many publishers in the gaming market prefer to stay mainstream resulting in a limited variety of gaming experiences available to physically impaired gamers. This is especially the case for physically impaired gamers experiencing some social digression when playing computer games or complex physical games.

Fruit Salad II is an improved version of the pervasive game Fruit Salad using tangible user interfaces involving both physical and virtual experiences. In real world, playing board games may be hard, tiring or perhaps impossible for disabled people. The challenge of our work is to allow for supplementing physical activities on such games using enhanced interface technologies. The use of existing off-the-shelf development software (Flash, C#, MS Agent) and physical components (Phidgets) allows a relatively simple and affordable design.

Fruit Salad II was tested with impaired people and demonstrated publically on the ISNM Open House and the Lübeck Informatik Jahrmarkt in the context of the "Jahr der Informatik" of the German Computer Society (GI) in 2006.

More information can be found in the following publication:

• Wendy Ann Mansilla, Andreas Schrader, Soenke Dohrn and Alma Salim
  Virtual and Tangible User Interfaces for Social and Accessible Pervasive Gaming
  Mensch & Computer 2006 Conference of the GI and the German Chapter of the ACM
  Gelsenkirchen, Germany, September 3-6, 2006
  Proceedings: A. M. Heinecke, H. Paul (Ed.): Mensch & Computer 2006: Mensch und Computer im StrukturWandel. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich, Germany, 2006.