Haptic, Audio, and Visual: Multimodal Distribution for Interactive Games

Since technology started to be distributed on a large scale, gaming experience has radically changed. After years of graphical-detail challenges, the attention has been shifted on how users can interact with games. Our paper follows this direction, aiming to develop a unifying framework to distribute user interactions over different platforms. The main idea is to make the hardware a user is playing with transparent to other players. Different platforms could run the same game, while the inputs from one are translated to output for another according to its own hardware capabilities. In addition, we present a conceptual model where the types of interaction between users are subordinated not only to the available devices but primarily to their main purpose for the different actions during the game. The architecture was initially applied to a basic cross-platform multiplayer musical game. We then implemented the conceptual model to a more complex multiplayer application to evaluate with experimental data the interaction distribution concept. The result was a shared game experience, where players perceived the competitors' presence but not the strong differences in the hardware equipment.