Activate your GAIM: a toolkit for input in active games

Active games are video games that involve physical activity. Interaction in active games is captured via a variety of input devices such as accelerometers, cameras, pressure sensors and exercise equipment. It is difficult for programmers to deal with this profusion of devices, leading most active games to be tied to a particular hardware platform. In this paper, we introduce the GAIM toolkit. GAIM simplifies input handling in active games through a high-level API that abstracts the details of individual devices. This allows developers to write code independently of the input devices used, allows the toolkit to dynamically adapt to the devices a player has available, and allows people with different hardware to play together. We illustrate the approach through two active games developed using the GAIM toolkit.