Playing Immersive Games on the REVERIE Platform

REVERIE (REal and Virtual Engagement in Realistic Immersive Environments) [1] is a multimedia and multimodal framework, which supports the creation of immersive games. The framework supports the creation of games integrating technologies such as 3D spatial audio, detection of the player's body movement using Kinect and WIMO sensors, NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) with advanced AI capabilities featuring various levels of representation and gameplay into an immersive 3D environment. A demonstration game was developed for REVERIE, which is an adapted version of the popular Simon Says game. In the REVERIE version, a player tries to follow physical instructions issued by two autonomous agents with different degrees of realism. If a player follows a physical instruction correctly, they are awarded one point. If not, they are deducted one point. This paper presents a technical overview of the game technologies integrated in the Simon Says demo and its evaluation by players with variable computer literacy skills. Finally the potential of REVERIE as an immersive framework for gaming is discussed, followed by recommendations for improvements in future versions of the framework.

[1]  Noel E. O'Connor,et al.  REVERIE: Natural human interaction in virtual immersive environments , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).

[2]  Peter Eisert,et al.  Articulated 3D model tracking with on-the-fly texturing , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).

[3]  Davide Andrea Mauro,et al.  Binaural Spatialization for 3D immersive audio communication , 2013 .

[4]  Noel E. O'Connor,et al.  A Framework for Human-like Behavior in an immersive virtual world , 2013, 2013 18th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP).

[5]  J. Hsu Multiple Comparisons: Theory and Methods , 1996 .

[6]  Fons Kuijk,et al.  Autonomous agents and avatars in REVERIE's virtual environment , 2015, Web3D.