Fast, low resource, head detection and tracking for interactive applications

This paper presents a real time, low resource, head tracking system. This system is used for a broad range of applications, the simplest being the control of a car in an arcade racing game. Another use of this system is the improvement of the gameplay of an adventure game. A more advanced application is the detection of the player's attentional state using a simple attention model in an attention aware game framework. This state is then used to adapt the game unfolding in order to enhance user's experience and improve the game attentional attractiveness. The experiments conducted on these different games showed that even if using head as a simple input device for explicit game control can improve the player’s immersion, its full potential can only be exploited when adapting or building new gameplay.