Researchers from ATLAS Institute’s ACME Lab presented one pictorial and two graduate student symposium papers at the 14th ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C), which took place June 20-23 in Venice, Italy. The theme of this year's conference was "Creativity, Craft and Design."

Graduate Student Symposium Paper

ACME Lab

 authored by Peter Gyory, (ATLAS PhD student)

Alternative Controllers (Alt Controls) enable game designers to creatively explore how humans interact with games and challenge the status-quo of game interfaces. Alt Controls, however, require technical skills and fabrication infrastructure that often make them inaccessible to the average designer. Tangible User Interface researchers stand to benefit from the unique approach that Alt Controls promote. Gyory's research aims to bridge the gap between game developers and Alt Controls through the use of everyday materials and crafting techniques. In this paper,  Gyory discusses a framework for physical computing that uses computer vision (Beholder) and an example introductory platform for Alt Controller design (TinyCade). Further research will refine this framework and incorporate the perspective of other game designers.

Publication

Peter Gyory. 2022. Creating Platforms to Support Craft and Creativity in Game Controller Design. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 708–710.  (June 20-23, 2022—Venice, Italy).

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Researchers from ATLAS Institute’s ACME Lab presented one pictorial and two graduate student symposium papers at the 14th ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C), which took place June 20-23 in Venice, Italy. The theme of this year's conference was "Creativity, Craft and Design."

Pictorial

ACME Lab

 authored by Peter Gyory, (ATLAS PhD student); Perry Owens, (Creative Industries master’s student); Matthew Bethancourt, (teaching associate professor and director of the Whaaat?! Lab;) Amy Banic, (visiting associate professor, ATLAS/computer science;)  Clement Zheng, (ATLAS post-doctoral research associate, PhD, Technology, Media & Society ‘20) and Ellen Yi-Luen Do, (faculty, ATLAS/computer science).

Tinycade is a platform designed to help game designers build their own mini arcade games by hand. With this platform, one can craft functioning game controllers out of everyday materials such as cardboard and toothpicks.  In this pictorial, the authors discuss the functionality of Tinycade and showcase three games that demonstrate the variety of controls possible with this platform.

Publication

Peter Gyory, Perry Y Owens, Matthew Bethancourt, Amy Banic, Clement Zheng, Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2022. “Build Your Own Arcade Machine with Tinycade,” In 14th ACM conference on , (June 20-23, 2022—Venice, Italy).

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Researchers from ATLAS Institute’s ACME Lab will present one pictorial and two Graduate Student Symposium papers at the , which will take place June 20-23 in Venice, Italy. The theme of this year's conference is "Creativity, Craft and Design." 

Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do, director of the ACME Lab, who is serving on the steering committee for the C&C conference series, is also the co-chair for the conference’s Graduate Student Symposium and for publicity. Besides being a co-author of the Tinycade paper, Do will also chair Session 7 on Sound and Music. Do also received a NSF grant (Award Abstract # ) to support bringing graduate students to the conference.

Held every other year in an international location since 1993, C&C serves as a gathering place for a diverse community of researchers, designers, engineers and artists who provide a cross-disciplinary perspective on creativity and cognition as well as technological innovation. It serves as a premier forum for presenting the world's best new research investigating computing's impact on and ability to promote creativity in all forms of human experience. 
 

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Like most, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory spent a lot of time at home during the pandemic lockdown. Unable to access the ACME Lab and the tools he typically uses—a 3D printer, laser cutter, woodworking tools and other fabrication equipment—Gyory faced a design challenge: how to make games using only household materials. 

One material he had in abundance was cardboard from online shopping. He also had a printer. 

Inspired by classic arcades, Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers ultimately developed Tinycade—a platform for DIY game controllers that anyone, including novices, can use to design and build arcade-like games using household materials such as cardboard, mirrors and hot glue.

The game platform builds on work that Gyory conducted with Clement Zheng, (PhD, TMS’20) for Printed Paper Markers, a framework for building interfaces using computer vision and printed markers. 

Gyory explains, “I want to empower people who have no technical experience–middle schoolers, high schoolers, my grandparents–to make an interface rather than accept what others make.” 

The platform is built around a smartphone, where the game is controlled via the phone’s camera using computer vision. Just as smartphone cameras recognize and respond to QR codes, Tinycade uses spatial movement of specialized markers for game play. 

Users don’t need to understand the platform’s inner workings; they can design their own Tinycade game by downloading templates and markers from the , printing and cutting the game cabinet according to the patterns, and assembling the pieces as instructed. Then they attach markers to the back of cardboard knobs. As users move the game  controls, a mirror reflects the movement of markers back to the camera lens. 

After sliding in the DIY controller and selecting a game from the Tinycade website, the “console” is ready to play. All Tinycade games were programmed by Gyory or other ACME Lab researchers. 

“Tinycade encourages people to invent and create new game controllers from recyclable cardboards instead of buying plastic and electronic game controllers that would later become e-wastes in landfills,” said Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do, director of the ACME Lab.  “Gamers can enjoy the fun of being both players and makers too.”

[video:https://vimeo.com/653129186]

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