“Fun2Write”: Portable immersive environment application

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile games are commonly used for children’s training and therapy. Literature shows that multisensory activities help raise the children’s interest in their learning, raise their concentration and reinforce their memories. Portable multi-sensory games can provide an immersive training environment for children anywhere. In this paper, we design and develop a portable multisensory educational game, Fun2Write, to help children to learn and recognize Traditional Chinese words. It could also help to evaluate how effective it is on encouraging children to learn and effectiveness of game-based interactive teaching methods. The game mechanism is based on whack-a-mole game, each mole holds a card with a Chinese character, players have to whack the correct mole in order to gain points, which is the metric to assess how well does the player recognize Chinese characters. Unlike conventional controls such as mouse, keyboard or screen tapping, Fun2Write utilizes a controller that has an in-built gyro system (Such as Nintendo’s Joycon) to simulate real life mole-whacking experience. The controller’s mechanism is similar to laser-pointer, which allows pointer movement in 3D space, and accurately tracks the movement of the player’s hand and adjusts the pointer’s position accordingly. When the pointer hovers above the mole. Upon locking onto the target, the player can then perform swinging gestures to simulate swinging a hammer. This design is intuitive and helps reduce cognitive load on re-learning controls. The game can be accessed on most hardware such as smart phones and computers. To extend the portability, we design and develop a low-cost portable cave by using projectors. The output results demonstrate the effectiveness of a portable immersive environment application.