Using your Smartphone as a Game Controller to your PC

Abstract: Many people in the world today own a smartphone. Smartphones of today usually have an advanced array of inputs in forms of tilting, touching and speaking, and outputs in forms of visual representation on the screen, vibration of the smartphone and speakers for sound. They also usually have different kinds of connectivity in forms of WLAN, Bluetooth and USB. Despite this we are still not seeing a lot of interaction between computers and smartphones, especially within games. We believe that the high presence of smartphones amongst people combined with the advanced inputs and outputs of the smartphone and the connectivity possibilities makes the smartphone a very viable option to be used as a game controller for the PC. We experimented with this developing the underlying architecture for the smartphone to communicate with the PC. Three different games were developed that users tested to see if the smartphone’s inputs are good enough to make it suitable for such purpose. We also attempted to find out if doing this made the gaming experience better, or in other words increased the enjoyment, of a PC game. The phone was suitable to be used as a game controller for the first two types of game, the space-racing game and the puzzle game, as our results shows in both terms of enjoyment and in terms of quality of the technical features of the phone such as accuracy and response time. The third game (First Person Shooter) however was better suited to be used with a keyboard and mouse, which our results shows in terms of both reduced enjoyment and complaints about response time of the phone.