Enhancing gamepad fps controls with tilt-driven sensitivity adjustment

Abstract

Playing a first person shooter (FPS) game using a gamepad is inherently more difficult than playing it with a mouse. In this study, we propose a novel input method for gamepads to improve the FPS aim task. We take a user-centric approach to identify unused secondary motions to be indicative of players' intents. We consider the gamepad tilt as a secondary motion that users naturally perform while playing with the gamepad, and interpret it as the intent of the user to move the FPS aim faster. We use a tilt sensor to detect the amount of tilt, and use it to increase the sensitivity of the gamepad analog joystick when the gamepad is tilted. We compare this to two other input methods: A pure gamepad and a tilt-aim scheme. Our experiments show that our approach is statistically better than the tilt-aim approach, and is comparable with the pure gamepad approach. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020. All rights reserved.