Fabricating and 3D printing gamepads is challenging not only in terms of appearance of them but also in terms of their physical validity and user experience that they might provide. This thesis addresses the issue of providing users the ability to hold in their hand a fabricated gamepad, which is an object similar to that the virtual character keeps in his/her hand inside the virtual world. Thus, this thesis presents a basic approach for converting 3D objects found in a variety of online datasets to functional gamepads by retargeting the structure of the gamepad’s buttons to the 3D model. The fabricated gamepads can then be used by gamers to enjoy their favorite game. The authors assumed that gamepads that have a relationship with the game enhance the game experience of users. This assumption is mainly based on a variety of previous work that investigates the use of “natural” interfaces. Therefore, in addition to the proposed approach, a two-part user study was also conducted to firstly understand whether the fabricated gamepads can be considered as valid physical objects and also to understand the way that participants experienced a game. First, the results indicated that the fabricated gamepads can be considered as valid physical objects and secondly, that they enhance the gaming experience of the users.

Dokumentet går igenom könsskillnaderna mellan män och kvinnor när det gäller datoranvändning, och hur användandets utveckling har skett på den senaste tiden. Den belyser även hur människans kropp, styrenheterna och spelet länkar varandra på ett kommunikativt sätt. Kontrollernas funktioner och styrsätt förklaras i basis för få en inblick i styrenheternas kommunikationssätt. Kontrollerna som tas upp grupperas därefter i olika rörelsemoment. En enkätundersökning kompletterar och stärker bilden över könsskillnader, åldersgränser, speltimmar, genre kategorisering och framtida behov. De problem som finns när det gäller kommunikation är att de inte är tillräckliga när man spelar. Oftast så är användare ute efter att ha en verklighetskänsla samt få en inlevelse i spelen. Dokumentets syfte är att ta reda på vilka kommunikativa metoder som finns och kontrollera om de är tillräckliga för att uppnå denna inlevelse i spelen. För att kunna tackla problemen så görs det en omvärldsanalys i arbetet samt en positivistisk tolkning av resultatet. Enkätundersökningen innehöll både kvantitativa och kvalitativa frågor. Vi har också kollat reliabiliteten och validiteten på källorna och enkätundersökningens svar. Själva slutsatserna dras genom en induktiv metod. / This document goes through the gender differences between men and women when operating computers and how the using has developed through the past years. It also gives the reader how the human body, the controllers and the game link together in a communicative way. The controller functions and way of steering are explained in a basic way to get an overview on the controller’s communicative ways. The controllers that are brought up are grouped by way of movement. A survey strengthens the view over gender differences, age, hours of game play, genre categorization and future needs. The problem when it comes to communication, it’s not enough when you're playing. Users are mostly after the "reality-feel" and to get empathy in games. The purpose of this document is to find existing communicative methods and to control if they are enough to get empathy in games. To tackle these problems, we did a global analysis and a positivistic interpretation of the result. The survey contained both quantitative and qualitative questions. We also checked the reliability and validity in the sources and the survey. The conclusions were drawn in an inductive method.

<p>Dokumentet går igenom könsskillnaderna mellan män och kvinnor när det gäller</p><p>datoranvändning, och hur användandets utveckling har skett på den senaste tiden.</p><p>Den belyser även hur människans kropp, styrenheterna och spelet länkar varandra på ett</p><p>kommunikativt sätt. Kontrollernas funktioner och styrsätt förklaras i basis för få en inblick i</p><p>styrenheternas kommunikationssätt. Kontrollerna som tas upp grupperas därefter i olika</p><p>rörelsemoment. En enkätundersökning kompletterar och stärker bilden över könsskillnader,</p><p>åldersgränser, speltimmar, genre kategorisering och framtida behov.</p><p>De problem som finns när det gäller kommunikation är att de inte är tillräckliga när man</p><p>spelar. Oftast så är användare ute efter att ha en verklighetskänsla samt få en inlevelse i</p><p>spelen.</p><p>Dokumentets syfte är att ta reda på vilka kommunikativa metoder som finns och kontrollera</p><p>om de är tillräckliga för att uppnå denna inlevelse i spelen.</p><p>För att kunna tackla problemen så görs det en omvärldsanalys i arbetet samt en positivistisk</p><p>tolkning av resultatet. Enkätundersökningen innehöll både kvantitativa och kvalitativa frågor.</p><p>Vi har också kollat reliabiliteten och validiteten på källorna och enkätundersökningens svar.</p><p>Själva slutsatserna dras genom en induktiv metod.</p> / <p>This document goes through the gender differences between men and women when operating</p><p>computers and how the using has developed through the past years. It also gives the reader</p><p>how the human body, the controllers and the game link together in a communicative way. The</p><p>controller functions and way of steering are explained in a basic way to get an overview on</p><p>the controller’s communicative ways. The controllers that are brought up are grouped by way</p><p>of movement. A survey strengthens the view over gender differences, age, hours of game</p><p>play, genre categorization and future needs.</p><p>The problem when it comes to communication, it’s not enough when you're playing. Users are</p><p>mostly after the "reality-feel" and to get empathy in games. The purpose of this document is</p><p>to find existing communicative methods and to control if they are enough to get empathy in</p><p>games. To tackle these problems, we did a global analysis and a positivistic interpretation of</p><p>the result. The survey contained both quantitative and qualitative questions. We also checked</p><p>the reliability and validity in the sources and the survey. The conclusions were drawn in an</p><p>inductive method.</p>

Games in general and computer games in particular have now become a mainstream activity for young people in the industrialized nations. Sadly, people’s interaction with computer artifacts and games are mainly still limited to the visual and auditive modalities. This constrains the richness of our interaction with those artifacts, it constrains the possibilities of using those artifacts to communicate and build relations with others, and it excludes some people from using them at all. This thesis answers the questions of whether it’s possible to use haptics as a single modality for conveying information in computer games, if it’s possible to translate the standard interfaces of existing computer games into haptic interfaces, and if it can be accomplished with the technology used in the gamepads of current generation game consoles. It also contains a theoretical foundation for using haptics in game design and a new design method for analyzing the requirements of computer game interface modalities. A computer game prototype called Sightlence was developed in order to answer these questions. The prototype was developed in four iterative cycles of design, development, and evaluative play sessions. Four groups of people participated in the play sessions: graduate students, and teachers, specializing in games; people who are deafblind; people from the general population; and pupils from a national special needs school in Sweden for children with deafness or impaired hearing combined with severe learning disabilities, or congenital deafblindness. The prototypes were tested with usability techniques for measuring performance and learnability. The usability tests showed that Sightlence can be successfully learned by people from the general population while the pupils with cognitive development disorders from the special needs school would need additional support in the game in order to learn to handle the increased abstraction caused by the haptic interface. The thesis ends with discussion of the designed and developed artifact Sightlence. The discussion touches on the design process, the usability testing, and possible future research and development relevant for making haptics a fruitful tool and medium for designers and people.

The aim of the thesis is to design, create and evaluate a user interface for control of service robot. I will focus on controlling of robotic arm, to be able to accomplish pick and place tasks. Specifically I will work with robotic platform PR2. The thesis describes different devices for sensing and perception of a user and usage of information from these devices to control robotic arm. Moreover, different methods for controlling of robotic arm are described there. Application design and implementation is presented further in this thesis together with description of the experiments used for evaluation of application.

<p dir="ltr">Since the Electronic Software Association (ESA) began reporting data for the video game industry in 2002, women have represented nearly half of the game playing population. However, despite this stable statistic, the industry’s ideal “Gamer” is consistently depicted as a young, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied male, and the games industry frequently targets this idealized identity through advertising and game design. This has resulted in a culture that is notably toxic towards women and marginalized players, built on an assumption of meritocracy within games—or the expectation that every player begins each game with the same advantages, disadvantages, and skills as every other player. While the construction of gamer identity has received extensive scholarly attention, gaming peripherals—such as video game controllers—are either minimized or left entirely out of the conversation. This dissertation, informed by feminist methodologies in technical communication and game studies, uses a mixed-methods approach involving archival research, visual analysis, surveys, and interviews to understand the intersections of video game controllers and gamer identity. Using Microsoft’s Xbox as a case study, the findings demonstrate how a dominant narrative has controlled controller design decisions through iterative processes. This has resulted in controllers that are more uncomfortable, more unusable, and more frustrating for and viewed more negatively by women and marginalized players. For each controller iteration, women and marginalized participants rated controllers significantly lower. Though the total improvement score (TIS) from first iteration to current iteration were similar between women and marginalized participants and cismale participants, the lower starting point for women and marginalized participants resulted in a lower ending point. Design decisions across controller iterations privilege cismale experiences, reifying gamer identity through controller design and resulting in not just an ideal gamer identity, but an ideal gamer body. </p>