Development Of An Energy-Efficient Gaming Platform To Evaluate Novel User Interaction

Abstract

In the modern age, the proliferation of electronic devices and their subsequent waste presents an increasing environmental challenge. With the continuing growth of technology and the urgency of sustainability becoming ever more important, there is an ever-increasing need to reimagine how we power and utilize our devices. This has been exacerbated in the last years with the proliferation of electric cars, which need a large amount of batteries to match the range of existing internal combustion cars. The motivation behind this thesis stemmed from the desire to address these challenges head-on and create a new interactive research platform to help re- searchers improve user interactivity in a battery-free, energy-constrained system.
In this thesis, I cover the design, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative low-power gaming research platform, in the shape of a portable gaming console. The console’s uniqueness is derived from its key characteristics: an interactive nature, a lack of traditional batteries, and a robust system for handling intermittent power. The term “interactive” has been redefined in the context of a battery-free console, creating a dynamic user-console relationship that allows real-time responses to diverse user inputs and environmental factors. For example, one of the energy harvesting methods of the console, a crank, can also behave as an input to the system, allowing the mapping of in-game actions to crank movements.
The architecture of the gaming console, both in hardware and software aspects, is designed from the ground up to support key characteristics such as ease of use, future expandability, and app portability. Due to the intermittent nature of the console, the software implementation has been designed around a seamless checkpointing system to handle power interruptions gracefully, where, from the point of view of the user, the game is resumed after a power failure without any apparent loss of progress.
Finally, in order to facilitate user experiments and future work, the console also features an efficient logging system to capture user interaction and system performance data during experiments, alongside an easy-to-use interface that facilitates porting of existing software to this platform.