GroupBrainstorm-Group:O

From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06

Contents 1 Team Members 2 Brainstormed Ideas 3 Idea Selection 4 Project Description 4.1 Target Users 4.2 Problem Description 4.3 Context 4.4 Why Anoto 4.5 Solution

Team Members

• Sean Carr
• Jason Lee
• Micahel Udaltsov
• Alexander Wallisch

Brainstormed Ideas

1. GamesCrafters Project
2. Pictionary
3. Path-Solving game
4. Diplomacy
5. Battleship
6. Inventory Control
7. IOUs
8. Anoto Digital Checks
9. Synchronized calendars
10. UI design (lo-fi prototype)
11. Art/drawing
12. Architectural design/blueprints
13. Blog/Xanga posting
14. Email/fax
15. Order forms
16. Applications
17. T-shirt design
18. Mapping/Directions
19. Game mapping/level design
20. 3D Graphics
21. Character Design
22. Animation Frames
23. Mind Mapping
24. Database/schema design
25. specs/system design
26. Logic diagrams
27. Flow charts
28. Lecture Notes
29. Note taking
30. Presentations/PowerPoint
31. Rubber Anoto pen
32. Paperweight
33. E-voting/Paper trail
34. Shopping
35. hand-writing tutor
36. education tool
37. Attendance verifier
38. Participation
39. Lecture surveys
40. Scavenger Hunt
41. Sports play diagrams
42. Furniture placement/Feng Shui
43. Signatures/shipping
44. Doodling
45. Digital Origami
46. Musical notation
47. Musical composition
48. Music control
49. Remote Control
50. Advertisements
51. Pre-packaged messages
52. Spy technology
53. Cheating
54. Invisible ink
55. Seismograph
56. Spirograph
57. Press-conference notes
58. Interview notes
59. Robot guidance
60. Constellation mapping

Idea Selection

We chose the GamesCrafters integration idea for several reasons. Part of the appeal was that it involved playing games, which is what all of our original proposals had in common. Also, it would leverage the features of a mature project with which 2 of our group members are already familiar. This makes not only for easy integration but also for the ability to extend the relationship and add new features to GAMESMAN thus enhancing the players experience. The ability to leverage existing code means that we can focus more attention on the user interface and experience. We forsee the most difficult part of this project being the gameplay recognition, which is also at the core of the usability of the interface. The more time we can devote to improving this, the better the gaming experience will be for the user. Many of our other project ideas seem to also hinge on advanced stroke recognition but would also require a lot of effort to develop a system to do something interesting with the recognized strokes. That is the main advantage of this idea of the other ideas we have that were also game based and sparked our interests.

Project Description

Target Users

The target user group is anyone who enjoys playing pen-and-paper based games of this variety (2 player, abstract strategy). Specifically within this group (which includes almost everybody), a product like this would appeal to and be targeted towards people who enjoy games like this and are also likely to use game analysis tools such as GAMESMAN. These people would be interested in either playing such games to win or in the mathmatics and science behind them, especially in the mathematics and science involved in winning strategies. People who participate actively in competitions/tournaments of these pen-and-paper based games would benefit greatly from a product such as this, as they would be able to see a post-game analysis of every move that was made. Very specifically, a product such as this would also be targeted towards users of the GamesCrafters system and researchers that have been involved with the GamesCrafters research group at some time, as these users would already be familiar with some of the interfaces involved with GamesCrafters and GAMESMAN.

Problem Description

GAMESMAN is a project started by Professor Dan Garcia that serves as an engine for solving, analyzing, and providing a perfect opponent for two player, finite, perfect information games such as tic-tac-toe, checkers, and many other games. The GAMESMAN suite currently provides a feature entitled "Visual Value History," which analyzes a finished game and displays information regarding the quality of moves from each given position; for example, a player can look back at a move he made midway through the game and observe that, while the move he made forced the game into a draw, there were in fact several ways he could have won the game from that position. In order to use the post-game analysis tools that come with GAMESMAN, it is necessary to use this interface to play the games. However, many of the games that GAMESMAN supports are traditionally played with pen and paper, such as tic-tac-toe or Dots and Boxes. Many more can be played quite easily on pen and paper, and it is conceptually easier for many people to understand a game played on paper than one played on a computer. Games can also be played at any time on paper, due to the portable nature of both the paper and the pen (the stats of the game are transmitted to the computer when the pen is docked after the game and the analysis can be viewed at a later time, when the users are in front of the computer). The problem is to recreate the easier and more user-friendly pen-and-paper interface for these pen-and-paper based games (as opposed to the rather cumbersome interface of a computer), while still offering the analytical tools in GAMESMAN. The solution to the problem involves creating an interface in which the strokes of the pen are translated in such a manner that it is known which game is being played and also what each symbol made by the pen represents. This interface can then communicate with the GAMESMAN interface, where analysis can take place. The current list of games we are considering creating interfaces for include Tic-Tac-Toe, Dots and Boxes, Nim, 1 to 10, Iceblocks, Odd or Even, Tac Tix, and Connections! This list will be modified as the project resumes and we discover which ones are and aren't feasible.

Context

There are two major aspects of this project:

• Physical to Digital

This is where the pen strokes are converted into a GAMESMAN formatted representation of the game that was played. This is a very hard task and involves adapting to infinitely many possible user inputs. In this stage we have to think about how the user will be entering the data and how that will affect the drawing of the game. There will have to be game specific intelligence at this stage to determine if the pieces should be Xs and Os or lines and boxes. Even the board will have to be recognized since we dont want to limit the users freedom on the page by constraining them to a preset area. The goal of the project is to simply have a blank piece of digital paper that the users can simply draw their own boards on, as it gives the users more freedom to play their own games. However, given the limitations of the API and our coding abilities, it may be the case that the digital paper will require pre-printed boards. Alternatively, due to the many variations of the way games are played (boards are often drawn with slight/subtle variations, different rules, etc.), it may be easier (or necessary) to standardize a single way of playing the game by way of pre-printed boards/rules. These are things our group will need to consider while keeping the ideal of a blank piece of paper in mind.

• GAMESMAN tools

Currently the GAMESMAN program has few post-game tools and does not yet have the ability to load in data from a game that has already been played. This means that additional tools and functionality must be built into the system, including any that user groups deem important in the analysis of their games. One major feature that should be added is the ability go back to any point in the game by clicking on that position in the Visual Value History graph and replay the game from there.

Why Anoto

GAMESMAN has the ability to do post-game analysis, but it currently requires that the game be played on a computer using the GAMESMAN interface. The type of game that GAMESMAN is built for is most commonly played on a spur-of-the-moment basis, and not necessarily when one is close to a computer. Even supposing that one of the players happened to have a laptop computer handy, it is often seen as too much effort to take the computer out, boot it up, and launch the GAMESMAN application just for the sake of playing a simple game.

Furthermore, even when a computer with the appropriate software is easily accessible, the interface follows the "hotseat" model and requires the players to trade off turns at the computer. Because the move time is short these trade-offs happen relatively frequently. A pen-and-paper interface is much more natural. It allows the players to keep a piece of paper between themseleves and simply trade the pen back and forth to make their moves. For those who are technologically-illiterate and cannot operate a computer for the life of them, the familiarity of playing a game on a piece of paper, like they are used to, will be appealing and come as a major relief. The Anoto pen and paper system allows for the familiarity of playing these pen-and-paper based games that we have been used to since childhood, while at the same time offering the powerful analysis tools of GAMESMAN.

Solution

The solution allows for people to be able to play games in a very freeform way on paper just as they do today and leverage the Anoto capabilities to import that game into GAMESMAN for added value. The strength of the proposed game interface is that it is not new and doesn't require learning a new computer-based interface, special drawings, or syntax (as currently imagined) and especially not pre-printed pages which lock the user into playing specific games in a specific way. It may be that we need some additional information to specify things like which game is being played since many games share the same board layout, but as proposed the system should be able to recognize a sheet containing games of say dots and boxes played by two users who weren't even aware they were using the Anoto system.

This shows the transition from a game of Tic-tac-toe on paper to the corresponding game that would be loaded in GAMESMAN. Notice the graph on the left side of the game which shows the post-game analysis and how "good" each move way. This is also illustrated in the graph below.

This is a close up of the visual value history after a game of Ice Blocks. It is easy to see when the three mistakes were made during this game because a winning (green) position is given to the other player when the current player already had a winning position. There are various other visual clues in this graph that give you information of the game and hopefully more will be added.

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