Academic literature on the topic 'Game mobile application'

Master of Science<br>Department of Computing and Information Sciences<br>Daniel Andresen<br>Mobile application development is one of the recent trends in computing Industry. Among several existing platforms for mobile, Android is one of the largest platforms in the world that run in several smart phones and tablets from various manufacturers like Google, Motorola, Samsung, HTC etc. Android number game is a simple game application in android targeting the school children to train their mathematical skills and help them to think. The application presents a graphical user interface with several colored bubble balls moving in random directions each with a number on it. The numbers are generated randomly within a specified range. The application allows the user to burst a moving bubble by touching it. The user’s goal is to burst all the bubbles in the ascending order of numbers on them. The application contains multiple levels and the number of bubbles increase as the levels increase. Also, the complexity of the set of numbers on the bubbles increases with increasing levels. Three lives are given to clear all the levels of the game and scores are computed for every correct shot on the ball. Bonus points are also added for clearing every level. The application maintains the top 10 players with their scores.

In recent years, much attention has been directed to the use of educational games for learning computer science concepts. The motivation of game-based learning with positive experience has been deeply studied in the literature, but game design for improving code reading skills have much room for improvement. Being good at the reading code is important to a professional developer. To address this issue, we defined a new educationally-oriented mobile game application, aimed at promoting the development of code reading skills in a new and fun way. The strategy of this game is to find errors in pieces of codes. At each level, students should find all syntactic and semantic errors in the code in a certain time in order to advance to the next level. Of the numerous programming languages, we chose Java because it is one of the most popular programming languages. In many colleges, Java plays a major role in introductory courses. Our vision is to allow instructors to employ the game in their introduction to programming in Java course. In addition, we hope it could be adapted for use in introductory courses using different programming languages. Data collected during the project helps us evaluate the impact of game-based learning on code reading in programming languages. We asked undergraduate students at the department of computer science at Virginia Tech to play with the game during Spring 2017 semester. The collected data analyzed, and students believe that Code Reading Dojo improves their code reading skills in Java and overall programming ability, in additions to help them find errors in their own program.<br>Master of Science

The report features the technical fundamentals, implementation, results and discussions within the field of mobile application development in the game industry. The thesis explored the game industry from within the industry, as the purpose was to further expand the game concept of the PC game theHunter by using a mobile platform. In the age of the multi-touch smartphone, applications are a huge and competitive industry withmany interesting development approaches. Using the fundamental principles of system architecture and interface design for mobile development, a game companion application based in an Android environment was developed. Game data was provided by the game development studio Expansive Worlds. The results showed support for the platform, but clearly states that further development is needed to actually explore the mobile market further. Implications for the results of the study and future tasks are discussed.

This paper aimed to discover how player satisfaction is affected by context-aware elements based on physical, real-world factors in an action role-playing game. The possibility of utilizing player modelling to counteract the reduction in player empowerment in a game heavily influenced by external factors was also explored. This was accomplished by creating an ARPG heavily integrated with various weather, and daytime, context data obtained from web-based APIs. Followed by conducting qualitative tests with help of eleven participants during a time period of a week. The evaluated results were presented in a manner of relevance for both context-driven applications as a whole, and for further exploration within game developments utilization of state of the art technology.

The use of and research on gamification has increased substantially since 2010. Most of the research on gamification has been done within education, specifically higher education. There is a dearth of research on gamification for children with disabilities. There has also been much research on the characteristics of successful instructional and educational games. In this thesis, theory on both gamification and the characteristics of successful instructional and educational games were used to design and implement several game design elements in a mobile sign language learning application to make it more enjoyable for the users. The game design elelemnts implemented were points, appropriate challenge, proximal goals, randomness and control. The target group of the application is children with disabilities making the thesis unique compared to any previous research. A rigorous gamification methodology was followed and a meeting with experts on children with special educational needs was held to get a good understanding of the target group. The development was done iteratively with two-week long iterations. After each iteration a presentation was held for the intern company and feedback was given. A school was willing to participate in an evaluation session and at the end of the thesis and the session was held with 22 children with learning disabilities. Both the original application and the application with the added gamification elements were evaluated and the results were compared. Results found that the children using the new version of the application had less throughput and found learning sign language to be more enjoyable and easier compared to the children using the original version of the application. The results are questionable, however, due tolimitations of the evaluation. Some of the issues were that the ages of the children differed between the groups, the severity of the disabilities was not considered, and the participants only got to use one version of the application for fifteen minutes.<br>自2010以来，游戏化技术的使用和研究大幅增加。在教育领域,特别是高等教育领域,有很多很多关于游戏化的研究。关于成功教学和教育游戏的特征也有很多相关研究。然而目前对残疾儿童游戏化技术的研究尚不多见。本文运用游戏化理论和成功教学游戏和教育游戏的特点，设计并实现了移动手语学习应用中的几个游戏设计元素，使移动手语学习应用更加有趣。实施的游戏设计要素有明确的目标、难度的选择、随机性、点和层次。应用的目标群体是残疾儿童，使得本论文与以往研究有所不同。我们遵循严格的游戏化方法，并与特殊儿童教育专家举行会议，以便更好地了解目标群体。用两星期的时间进行迭代开发。每次迭代后，在实习生公司进行演示并得到反馈。一所学校愿意参加评测，在论文结束时，22名有学习障碍儿童参加了评测。对原有应用和添加游戏化元素的应用进行评价，并对结果进行比较。结果发现，使用新版本应用程序的儿童比使用原始版本应用程序的儿童的工作量较少，并且学习手语过程更愉快、更容易。然而由于评估的局限性,可能会影响实验结果,例如各组儿童的年龄不同，残疾的严重程度没有考虑，并且参与者只能使用一个版本的应用程序15分钟。后续研究将评估这些因素的影响。

In this thesis, general problems are considered where a group of agents should autonomously position themselves in such a way that a global objective function is maximized, whereas each agent uses only the measurement of its own utility function. Specially constructed extremum seeking schemes for single and multi-agent systems are presented, where the agents have only access to the current value of their individual utility functions and do not know the analytical model of the global or local objectives. By using an approximative system that is calculated using a methodology based on Lie brackets, practical stability of an equilibrium point is proved for the single agent as well as for the multi-agent case. The motion dynamics of the agents are modeled as single integrators, double integrators and unicycles. A potential game approach is used in order to deduce conditions under which the whole group of agents converges to a region arbitrary close to the maximum of a global objective function, that coincides with the Nash equilibrium of the game. As an application of the proposed algorithms, the sensor coverage problem is introduced. In this problem, a group of autonomous sensors is meant to position themselves such that a certain region is covered optimally, in the sense that the amount of detected events appearing in this region, is maximized. The problem is interpreted as a potential game where individual utility functions for each sensor are constructed in a way suitable for the direct application of the proposed optimization methodology.

Les terminaux mobiles offrent à ce jour des performances de plus en plus élevées (CPU, résolution de l’écran, capteurs optiques, etc.) Cela rehausse la qualité vidéo des services média, que ce soit pour le visionnage de contenu vidéo (streaming, TV, etc.) ou pour des applications interactives telles que le jeu vidéo. Mais cette évolution concernant l'image n'est pas ou peu suivie par l'intégration de systèmes de restitution audio de haute qualité dans ce type de terminal. Or, parallèlement à ces évolutions concernant l'image, des solutions de son spatialisé sur casque, à travers notamment la technique de restitution binaurale basée sur l'utilisation de filtres HRTF (Head Related Transfer Functions) voient le jour.Dans ce travail de thèse, nous nous proposons d’évaluer l’intérêt que peut présenter le son binaural lorsqu'il est utilisé sur une application mobile audiovisuelle. Une partie de notre travail a consisté à déterminer les différents sens que l’on pouvait donner au terme « application mobile audiovisuelle » et parmi ces sens ceux qui d’une part étaient pertinents et d’autre part pouvaient donner lieu à une évaluation comparative avec ou sans son binaural.Le couplage entre son binaural et visuel sur mobile occasionne en premier lieu une question d’ordre perceptive : comment peut-on organiser spatialement une scène virtuelle dont le son peut se déployer tout autour de l’utilisateur, et dont le visuel est restreint à un si petit écran ? La première partie de cette thèse est consacrée à cette question. Nous menons une expérience visant à étudier le découplage spatial possible entre un son binaural et un visuel rendus sur smartphone. Cette expérience révèle une forte tolérance de l’être humain face aux dégradations spatiales pouvant survenir entre les deux modalités. En particulier, l’absence d’individualisation des HRTF, ainsi qu’un très grand découplage en élévation ne semblent pas affecter la perception. Par ailleurs, les sujets semblent envisager la scène « comme si » ils y étaient eux-mêmes directement projetés, à la place de la caméra, et cela indépendamment de leur propre distance à l’écran. Tous ces résultats suggèrent la possibilité d’une association entre son binaural et visuel sur mobile dans des conditions d’utilisation proches du grand public.Dans la seconde partie de la thèse, nous tentons de répondre à la question de l’apport du binaural en déployant une expérience « hors les murs », dans un contexte plausible d’utilisation grand public. Trente sujets jouent dans leur vie quotidienne à un jeu vidéo de type Infinite Runner, développé pour l’occasion en deux versions, une avec du son binaural, et l’autre avec du son monophonique. L’expérience dure cinq semaines, à raison de deux sessions par jour. Ce protocole procède de la méthode dite "Experience Sampling Method", sur l’état de l’art de laquelle nous nous sommes appuyés. Nous calculons à chaque session des notes d’immersion, de mémorisation et de performance, et nous comparons les notes obtenues entre les deux versions sonores. Les résultats indiquent une immersion significativement meilleure pour le binaural. La mémorisation et la performance ne sont en revanche pas soumises à un effet statistiquement significatif du rendu sonore. Au-delà des résultats, cette expérience nous permet de discuter de la question de la validité des données en fonction de la méthode de déploiement, en confrontant notamment bien-fondé théorique et faisabilité pratique<br>In recent years, smartphone and tablet global performances have been increased significantly (CPU, screen resolution, webcams, etc.). This can be particularly observed with video quality of mobile media services, such as video streaming applications, or interactive applications (e.g., video games). However, these evolutions barely go with the integration of high quality sound restitution systems. Beside these evolutions though, new technologies related to spatialized sound on headphones have been developed, namely the binaural restitution model, using HRTF (Head Related Transfer Functions) filters.In this thesis, we assess the potential contribution of the binaural technology to enhance the quality of experience of an audiovisual mobile application. A part of our work has been dedicated to define what is an “audiovisual mobile application”, what kind of application could be fruitfully experienced with a binaural sound, and among those applications which one could lead to a comparative experiment with and without binaural.In a first place, the coupling of a binaural sound with a mobile-rendered visual tackles a question related to perception: how to spatially arrange a virtual scene whose sound can be spread all around the user, while its visual is limited to a very small space? We propose an experiment in these conditions to study how far a sound and a visual can be moved apart without breaking their perceptual fusion. The results reveal a strong tolerance of subjects to spatial discrepancies between the two modalities. Notably, the absence or presence of individualization for the HRTF filters, and a large separation in elevation between sound and visual don’t seem to affect the perception. Besides, subjects consider the virtual scene as if they were projected inside, at the camera’s position, no matter what distance to the phone they sit. All these results suggest that an association between a binaural sound and a visual on a smartphone could be used by the general public.In the second part, we address the main question of the thesis, i.e., the contribution of binaural, and we conduct an experiment in a realistic context of use. Thirty subjects play an Infinite Runner video game in their daily lives. The game was developed for the occasion in two versions, a monophonic one and a binaural one. The experiment lasts five weeks, at a rate of two sessions per day, which relates to a protocol known as the “Experience Sampling Method”. We collect at each session notes of immersion, memorization and performance, and compare the notes between the monophonic sessions and the binaural ones. Results indicate a significantly better immersion in the binaural sessions. No effect of sound rendering was found for memorization and performance. Beyond the contribution of the binaural, we discuss about the protocol, the validity of the collected data, and oppose theoretical considerations to practical feasibility

Une grande partie des résultats rapportés dans cette thèse est basée sur une observation qui n'a jamais été faite pour les communications sans fil et le contrôle de puissance en particulier: les niveaux de puissance d'émission et plus généralement les matrices de covariance peuvent être exploitées pour intégrer des informations de coordination. Les échantillons de rétroaction dépendants des interférences peuvent être exploités comme canal de communication. Premièrement, nous montrons que le fameux algorithme itératif de remplissage d'eau n'exploite pas suffisamment l'information disponible en termes d'utilité-somme. En effet, nous montrons que l'information globale d'état de canal peut être acquise à partir de la seule connaissance d'une rétroaction de type SINR. Une question naturelle se pose alors. Est-il possible de concevoir un algorithme de contrôle de puissance distribué qui exploite au mieux les informations disponibles? Pour répondre à cette question, nous dérivons la caractérisation de la région d'utilité pour le problème considéré et montrons comment exploiter cette caractérisation non seulement pour mesurer globalement l'efficacité mais aussi pour obtenir des fonctions de contrôle de puissance à un coup efficaces au niveau global. Motivés par le succès de notre approche sur les réseaux d'interférences mono bande et multibande, nous nous sommes demandé si elle pourrait être exploitée pour les réseaux MIMO. Nous avons identifié au moins un scénario très pertinent. En effet, nous montrons que l'alignement d'interférence opportuniste peut être implémenté en supposant seulement une rétroaction de covariance d'interférence plus bruit à l'émetteur secondaire. Puis, dans le dernier chapitre, nous généralisons le problème de la quantification, la motivation étant donnée par certaines observations faites dans les chapitres précédents. Premièrement, nous supposons que le quantificateur et le déquantificateur sont conçus pour maximiser une fonction d'utilité générale au lieu de la fonction de distorsion classique. Deuxièmement, nous supposons que le quantificateur et le déquantificateur peuvent avoir des fonctions d'utilité différentes. Cela soulève des problèmes techniques non triviaux, notre revendication est de faire un premier pas dans la résolution d'eux<br>A large part of the results reported in this thesis is based on an observation which has never been made for wireless communications and power control in particular: transmit power levels and more generally transmit covariance matrices can be exploited to embed information such as coordination information and available interference-dependent feedback samples can be exploited as a communication channel. First, we show that the famous iterative water-filling algorithm does not exploit the available information sufficiently well in terms of sum-utility. Indeed, we show that global channel state information can be acquired from the sole knowledge of an SINR-type feedback. A natural question then arises. Is it possible to design a distributed power control algorithm which exploits as well as possible the available information? To answer this question, we derive the characterization of the utility region for the considered problem and show how to exploit this characterization not only to measure globally efficiency but also to obtain globally efficient one-shot power control functions. Motivated by the success of our approach for single-band and multi-band interference networks, we asked ourselves whether it could be exploited for MIMO networks. We have identified at least one very relevant scenario. Indeed, we show that opportunistic interference alignment can be implemented by only assuming interference-plus-noise covariance feedback at the secondary transmitter. Then, in the last chapter, we generalize the problem of quantization, the motivation for this being given by some observations made in the previous chapters. First, we assume that the quantizer and de-quantizer are designed to maximize a general utility function instead of the conventional distortion function. Second, we assume that the quantizer and de-quantizer may have different utility functions. This raises non-trivial technical problems, our claim is to make a very first step into solving them

Dissertação para Obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial<br>Touchscreen mobile devices growth resulted in an explosion of the mobile applications. Focusing on touch mobile game applications this study aims to fulfill a research gap, creating appropriate usability guidelines for these applications. Concerns about usability, touch technologies, mobile devices and game testing, provided the background needs for this study. Initial game application tests allowed for the creation and implementation of such proposed usability guidelines into a support checklist (UsaGame), designed to help applications developers. An evaluation test was performed with 20 users in order to assess the validity of the proposed guidelines. Results from the test of the two builds from the same game application allowed comparisons that led to the assessment of the importance of some of the guidelines implemented into the application. Results suggested a usability improvement on the game application implemented with the guidelines. Furthermore results allowed commenting on all proposed usability guidelines.