Real-time tracking of hand gestures for interactive game design

User interaction is an essential feature in the design of an interactive game. Most existing games receive inputs from users via conventional devices such as keyboard, mouse, joystick and paddle. More recent games make use of infrared beams from user's devices, the stylus from touch screen, or pressure-sensing pads to provide rich contextual sensing and interactions. In this paper, we propose the use of hand gestures as the basis for users to directly interact with game objects that are rendered across a flat plasma or LCD display. It forms a new paradigm of interaction in which the physical movements of hands in the form of hand gestures are coordinated along with the virtual objects in the game. Thus, the user effectively becomes an ldquoinput devicerdquo. We make use of a low-cost Web camera that is mounted over the gaming screen display to provide image-feed to the hand tracking and gesture recognition system, called Germane, which employs the hull-point analysis algorithm for gesture recognition. A working prototype of Germane has been developed to validate its operations on several common gestures. Performance evaluation results of Germane are also presented.