The conventional method of measuring foot-arch parameters is highly dependent on the measurer’s skill level, so accurate measurements are difficult to obtain. To solve this problem, we propose an autonomous geometric foot-arch analysis platform that is capable of capturing the sole of the foot and yields three foot-arch parameters: arch index (AI), arch width (AW) and arch height (AH). The proposed system captures 3D geometric and color data on the plantar surface of the foot in a static standing pose using a commercial RGB-D camera. It detects the region of the foot surface in contact with the footplate by applying the clustering and Markov random field (MRF)-based image segmentation methods. The system computes the foot-arch parameters by analyzing the 2/3D shape of the contact region. Validation experiments were carried out to assess the accuracy and repeatability of the system. The average errors for AI, AW, and AH estimation on 99 data collected from 11 subjects during 3 days were −0.17%, 0.95 mm, and 0.52 mm, respectively. Reliability and statistical analysis on the estimated foot-arch parameters, the robustness to the change of weights used in the MRF, the processing time were also performed to show the feasibility of the system.

This paper introduces a novel interface between game players and game contents for a physical interactive game. The physical interactive games are getting the spotlight in the international game market. To make the game more interesting, a variety of game interfaces connecting the game player with game contents have also recently attracted a lot of attentions with them. The most popular interfaces are 1) human gesture-based and 2) motion simulator-based. The human gesture-based game interface allows the players to interact and play with games using their bodies, instead of traditional hand-operated input devices. The motion simulator-based interface provides the player with the feeling of being immersed in the game contents, as one of output devices. The proposed interface combines these input and output concepts, and can provide the player with more realistic game environment by amplifying the synergy generated by combining two concepts. The most powerful synergy is feedback in which the current player's motion is fed back to the next movement of the player through the motion simulator. The proposed interface thus can provide an exciting experience for players on the basis of a new type of interface where they play with the physical interactive game.

Physical interactive games are recently hogging the limelight in the international game market, as they adopt a new concept of input devices that allows the players to interact and play with the games using their own bodies instead of hand-operated input devices. Since the concept is still tethered to a screen-based output, its feedback part is not as fluid and natural as its input part. This paper proposes a novel concept for a new gaming experience based on a bidirectional user interface wherein a user's body motion as a control input and physical/visual feedback from output devices interact with each other. The physical feedback is a means of providing a physical response to a player, and can be the output of game contents and/or responses or effects from the control input. To provide physical feedback, the proposed interface uses a rider simulator as the output device. Then a user-device control loop between the control input and output devices is created, which may result in a divergent feedback and eventually, dangerous circumstances that can lead to serious injury. Therefore, the proposed interface introduces an energy bounding algorithm to guarantee stable and safe game play, even if the game players stand on the simulator to play the game and take the feedback. A pilot user study was performed to analyze the performance of this algorithm and to verify how easily and effectively users enjoy the system, and the study showed that the proposed interface can provide an exciting experience for players on the basis of a new type of interface whereby they play with physical interactive games on the rider simulator.