Sensation: Measuring the Effects of a Human-to-Human Social Touch Based Controller on the Player Experience

We observe an increasing interest on usage of full-body interaction in games. However, human-to-human social touch interaction has not been implemented as a sophisticated gaming apparatus. To address this, we designed the Sensation, a device for detecting touch patterns between players, and introduce the game, Shape Destroy, which is a collaborative game designed to be played with social touch. To understand if usage of social touch has a meaningful contribution to the overall player experience in collaborative games we conducted a user study with 30 participants. Participants played the same game using i) the Sensation and ii) a gamepad, and completed a set of questionnaires aimed at measuring the immersion levels. As a result, the collected data and our observations indicated an increase in general, shared, ludic and affective involvement with significant differences. Thus, human-to-human touch can be considered a promising control method for collaborative physical games.

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