Way Out is a mobile phone game requires player to move the device around the body for navigation.

Thanks to motion sensors embedded in smartphones, we are able to navigate an omnidirectional panorama by moving the device around the body, as if the display is a peephole to another world. However, existing applications mainly focus on the spherical surface around the user with a constant radius, i.e., single-layer navigation. We present Way Out, a game allowing players to navigate multi-layer panorama scenes by around-body interactions. Way Out explores the interaction possibilities of reaching out into panorama with depth. By utilizing the front-facing camera, the system tracks the player’s face and infers the distance between the user and the device based on the size of the face, thus enabling depth interactions. In this game, the player can walk through a panoramic forest maze that consists of four layers in depth and drag items in physical 3D space.

Entended abstract version

Demo gameplay

Game scene design


I proposed the main interaction techniques and implemented the camera sensing for the mobile phone.

Authors Shan-Yuan Teng (National Taiwan University)
Mu-Hsuan Chen (National Taiwan University)
Yung-Ta Lin (National Taiwan University)
Publication Shan-Yuan Teng, Mu-Hsuan Chen, and Yung-Ta Lin. 2017. Way Out: A Multi-Layer Panorama Mobile Game Using Around-Body Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 230-233. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3048410
Student Game Competition: Innovative Interface
Paper PDF (3.5MB)
Slides PDF (6.1MB)