Natural Interface for Recycling Activity

N. Jofré, G. Rodríguez, Y. Alvarado, J. Fernández, R. Guerrero

{npasinetti, gbrodriguez, ymalvarado, jmfer, rag}@unsl.edu.ar
Laboratorio de Computación Gráfica (LCG) - Universidad Nacional de San Luis
Ejército de los Andes 950
Tel: 0266 4420823, San Luis, Argentina

Abstract—Today the increasing sophistication of potential benefits supporting the development of

computer games has chosen to involve more sophisticated psychomotor, spatial, analytical, strategic and insight
devices. Moreover, there have been new gaming purposes, skills and learning capabilities [11] [2].
which no longer focus on entertainment. These new games
The major benefit is being a learning tool since the
are Serious Games, which aims to facilitate, support and
enhance the process of learning on the players. This paper
interplay of education and gameplay induces to higher
presents an immersive learning environment for recycling motivation of players and enhance their learning success.
teaching through a serious game. In order to improve the Therefore in recent years serious games have gained the
user’s experience in the game, natural interaction concepts interest of many scholars from diverse fields such as
were applied by using tracking and haptic devices and 3D psychology, cultural studies, computer science, sociology,
visualization into an immersive CAVE-like environment. pedagogy and environment awareness [16] [10] [12].
Today there is an increasing recognition of the need to
Keywords—CAVE, Environment awareness, Haptic sustain an ecologically-balanced environment. A helping
devices, Natural interaction, Real time programming,
action to this problem is to reduce and avoid negative
Serious games, Virtual reality.
impacts of waste on the environment, being the diversion
of biodegradable waste from landfills an important
contribution to limiting greenhouse as emissions. In this
I. TERMINOLOGY
context, serious games are tools that add entertainment
to teaching and training for adoption of sustainable
CAVE: Computer Assisted Virtual Environment. development practices. Consequently to achieve a
VRmedia: Virtual Reality Media. realistic learning is necessary to provide a more
DOF: Degrees of Freedom. sophisticated game [19] [17].
ERC: Extended Range Controller. The employment of Virtual Reality (VR) is usually a
natural idea to improve the impression of living in a
simulated reality. This tool is largely used in many areas
II. INTRODUCTION as medicine, industries, education and entertainment,

N OWADAYS playing computer games has become a

though it is an interesting option to be applied to serious
games with the use of immersive virtual environments [4]
[5].
massively popular activity. At the beginning they had a
positive potential in children and teenagers because Immersive virtual reality is a technology that consists
games were engaging activities usually used purely for in an artificial environment where the user feels like
entertainment, but today the sociable and cultural immersed. The cognitive processes that take place
changes in population and technology triggered new throughout a game should be intuitive processes, thus an
games to different ages and styles [7]. important feature is that processes of learning and
New and thrilling games with the state of the art persuasion must be the most natural possible; they have
technology provide players with an entertaining gaming to be transparent and unconscious to the user. To do this,
experience. However, there is a kind of games which aim using different VR devices for an easy and natural user
to address a specific problem or to teach a certain skill. interaction is an attractive solution [13] [18].
These games are called Serious Games and have also This work presents an immersive serious game for
penetrated the world of education [1] [2]. environment awareness. The work uses a cave-like
Serious Games mainly relates to interactive computer- environment, virtual reality and natural interaction
based game software that intentionally produces games devices like data gloves, motion trackers and 3D lenses.
for “serious” purposes in the first place. There are various The idea is to develop a game for motivate and teach the
definitions about its theoretical concept but all have in basic principles of recycling and training about different
common the learning and education. The serious games types of recycling.
applications represent opportunities for game developers
to apply their talents to areas outside of the
entertainment industry keeping most of the time the
same specification that an ordinary video game [10] [3]. III. GAME PLATFORM
Usually the attributes included in a computer game
are players, goal, rules, artificial character and conflict; To many people recycling is a loss of time, most barely
the last is an optional attribute in collaborative games. separate the garbage of their homes and puts it on their
Unlike an usual game, serious games provide many home’s trash container. This does not happen in public
places, because there is no habit of throwing the trash The distributed multiple-display virtual reality
where it should be and even more to separate the garbage hardware components used in this work is a CAVE-like
according to the type of waste. Even though there are virtual reality, which is a PC-based system. The hardware
several campaigns on recycling (Wecycle, Plastic Hero, components of the PC-based CAVE-like system are
among others) which are successful to a certain extent, described as follows:
ideally it is necessary to find a way to make from  Personal computers (PCs) - five PCs for driving the
recycling a daily activity [14] [9]. system. One is the server for receiving input
As it was mentioned, serious games do not have the signals; the others are clients for screen display.
entertainment as its main objective and since people has  Projectors - four high bandwidth stereo projectors.
not environmental habits (serious purpose), serious Today, three of them implemented.
games would allow making recycling a fun and natural  Signal sync devices - the signal sync devices are
activity. Even more, it would be interesting that game used to synchronize the RGB signals from client
interface provided a scenario and tools that exploit the PCs.
natural and intuitive functionality of humans.  Stereo vision - shutter glasses and other
A player is a regular person that may or may not have peripherals (emitters, wiring, etc.) needed to
knowledge on using technological devices, but advances operate them properly.
in technology supply different kind of devices that have  Viewing point tracking device - a viewing point
been developed with the idea of providing a more natural tracking device (one transmitter, two receivers)
interaction. Therefore, having these useful devices, would with an extended range controller (ERC).
grant to players the ability to operate on recycling work  3D Wand - 6-DOF hand-held input device.
in an intuitive way.  Screen/projection surface, supporting structure,
A. Computing Platform for Immersive Visualization cable, etc.
The game was developed to work on a computing
PC connectivity of the PC-based CAVE-like system is
platform for immersive collaborative 3D virtual world
depicted in Fig. 2 and established according to [15]. A
visualization (See Fig. 1). It allows the use of
software package was developed to drive the PC- based
geographically distributed VR media, called a multi-
CAVE-like system (See Fig. 3).
VRmedia. Remote players can navigate and interact
through a 3D scenery in a multi-VRmedia [6].

Fig. 2. Environment Interaction

Fig. 1. Platform for Collaborative Visualization
The hardware used for interaction and gesture
The computing platform includes a hardware recognition motion of the entire 3D body is shown in
architecture and a software framework (including Figure 2. The main components are:
application frameworks), where the combination allows  The CAVE-like virtual reality described.
software, particularly application software, to run. Typical  3D lenses. These enable user to watch the scene in
platforms include a computer’s architecture, operating stereoscopy and thus increase the degree of
system, programming languages and related user immersion.
interface (run-time system libraries or graphical user  Kinect motion sensor. This allows tracking of the
interface). A system to visualize scenarios in a multi- joints of head, neck, shoulder, arms, hands and legs.
virtual reality media environment has been defined. Such  Motion Trackers. They allow tracking parts of the
system will provide the necessary structure for attributes body difficult to sense.
definition, rendering and collaborative multi-  Data Gloves. They allow measure the finger
visualizations, as well as the needed interactive resources. movements and the hand orientation.
 Fig. 4. Recycling Scenario

V. EVALUATION AND RESULTS

To evaluate this platform, we used the previous

defined serious game to be tested on different people. In
order to evaluate quantitatively how natural and easy it
was for people to play using natural interaction devices,
Fig. 3. System Structure we chose a simple challenge, which assesses the time it
took to get the challenge. The challenge consisted of
finding some trash, pick it up and throw it into a nearby
trash container. To appreciate the learning acquired by
IV. CASE STUDY people, the same challenge was repeated five times.
Participants were classified into two different groups:
This game immerses the user into a virtual world. In
young people and adult people. The main reason is
this world, the user will learn about the importance of
because the speed of acquiring knowledge of young
recycling by interacting with virtual objects like in trendy
people is always superior to older people. The group of
games. The game presents the following topics:
young people was made up of boys and girls between 8
 User must learn that garbage has a place where it
and 21 years old. And the adult group was formed with
belongs.
men and women between 30 and 40 years old.
 User must learn that there is an activity called
recycling, which refers to activity of separate the
waste according to their material and then reuse
them.
 Given/found a particular waste learn to put it in its
corresponding container.
The game takes into account the basic structure of a
video game which is: to have a scenario, players, goal,
possible conflicts and dynamics. As basic methodology of
the game, the instructions are: to seek the trash, to take it
and place it in the appropriate waste container. The
winner of the game will be the user who accumulated as
much waste as he/she could and made the fewer mistakes
while categorize.
So far, talking about a traditional video game, the main Fig. 5. Learning Curve
difference is that the player will not make use of
traditional devices such as keyboard, mouse and joysticks. At each point, the chart shows an average time for
The user will have devices that allow the natural each test on young and adults players (See Fig.5). As it
movement of the body and so it will can navigate on was expected, the average time for young group was
scene, whether to change its view or go to a certain always less than for the adult group, which is
position (within the area bounded to the user) with the understandable, for the frequent use of technological
aim of possibly pick up a residue or reach a container. In devices and home video game console such as
summary, the user should move naturally without PlayStation, Xbox and Wii.
noticing that it is within a recycling game scenario (See However, for both groups, it can be observed a
Figure 4). significant decrease in the average time. This proves that
natural interaction devices help people to interact into a [19] Pascal Lessel, Maximilian Altmeyer, and Antonio Kruger. Analysis
of recycling capabilities of individuals and crowds to encourage
challenge in an intuitive way. Thus, serious games achieve
and educate people to separate their garbage playfully. In
their goal, teaching and creating good habits in people in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors
an entertaining and fun way, and not as tedious chores. in Computing Systems, CHI 15, pages 10951104, New York, NY,
USA, 2015.

VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the European
Community, Alfa III - GAVIOTA, Contract N: VIII. BIOGRAPHIES
EuropeAid/129-877/C/ACT/RAL-1.
Finally, this work might not have been possible to L. Nicolás Jofré is a Computer
write had it not been for the efforts of the prior IEEEtran Science student at Universidad
Nacional de San Luis, San Luis. At this
developers. moment he is working on his final year
project on Virtual Reality and Natural
Interfaces. His research interests
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