Related Research, Markets, and More

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Published on 2020-09-16 00:00:00 +0000

Loosely Related Research and Patents:

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1983302.1983311?casa_token=xDq5mISGRYsAAAAA%3At-Qg6wVDjR5s4Zx0HE8uWE_5yCu7p343iMyEhGf0_X4YgcNZTzTRGQdm2TeCUAFk-SPbE8OEG8Lg9A
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267403944_Game_Not_Over_Accessibility_Issues_in_Video_Games
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2207676.2208564?casa_token=pIodSK5jDX4AAAAA:-HplyNAC5p7QNmxoNniDDVF5dopj73V249ctBxon3AeEZoNWi8hH6KRzouj6YT5QJc_qqXZlesyAfQ
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0957417412005908
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328215976_Spoken_Conversational_AI_in_Video_Games-Emotional_Dialogue_Management_Increases_User_Engagement
• https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/1999/SS-99-02/SS99-02-002.pdf
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301417670_Player_Identity_Dissonance_and_Voice_Interaction_in_Games
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07308-8_19
• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5558606
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/985921.986170?casa_token=T7qxgvxmGuMAAAAA:RRmPAdDemV_IO0BhXHK59IIXM0Ql-KXG_gHbTwupJsy8yR5tH9uH_G84MIxRl33w8Jpdp6Zlb4hy9g
• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Rabbit-Run%3A-Gaze-and-Voice-Based-Game-Interaction-Sundstedt/bf0651a38e1ba076b96b20add8a834a8af26be8a?p2df
• https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs376/2008/project_results/ricciardi_john_cs376_spring08_multimodal_gaming.pdf
• https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/elektrik/abstract.htm?id=23007
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US5893064A/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US4704696A/en
• (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8296151B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US10540976B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US9250703B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US6428449B1/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US7109970B1/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US9489171B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019732A1/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US6456977B1/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US7877262B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US7785197B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US7233904B2/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020161586A1/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US5393073A/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US5358259A/en
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US5393070A/en

After finding these related research articles, I did a deeper dive of five articles and summarized them below:

1. Spoken Conversational AI in Video Games: Emotional Dialogue Management Increases User Engagement - They found that a voice system that also incorporated emotion detection was considered more enjoyable and immersive then a regular voice system without the emotion detection.
2. “Situated AI” in Video Games: Integrating NLP, Path Planning and 3D Animation - They seemed to be arguing that a voice system in video games should use Natural Language Processing on the voice commands.
3. Immersion in Multimodal Gaming: Playing World of Warcraft with Voice Controls - There were a few potential flaws with the design of the study, which were pointed out, but it seemed cognitive load has an impact on immersion, as measured by fixation duration.
4. Rabbit Run: Gaze and Voice Based Game Interaction - This project found that people felt gaze and voice commands were too slow compared to mouse and keyboard, but players felt more immersed with gaze and voice controls.
5. Player Identity Dissonance and Voice Interaction in Games - Games where the voice commands are things the player believes would be said by the player instead of actions were liked better by players, based on this study.

Market Research

My research falls predominantly under the entertainment or technology sector. The entertainment sector had a global value of 2.1 trillion dollars in 2018 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/237749/value-of-the-global-entertainment-and-media-market/, and the technology sector had a value of 2.9 trillion dollars in 2016 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/886397/total-tech-spending-worldwide/. Some of the big players in the industry are Nintendo ($2.2B), Ubisoft ($0.5B), Microsoft ($2.8B), Sony ($3.8B), and Electronic Arts ($1.5B) (These are from Q4 2019 Revenue). Some of these businesses (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony) generate revenue from more than just game development, which may partly explain the large discrepancy. There are several older products known for voice commands, such as Nintendogs, Tom Clancy’s EndWar, and the VoiceGaming SDK. There appear to be a few newer products as well such as There Came An Echo and The Broken Seal.

Stakeholders/Audience

Any video game company could potentially benefit, though the main benefit would be to smaller, “indie” game dev companies. As the main benefit would go to these smaller companies, they have to be very aware of costs related to using it. Therefore it makes the most sense to use the free speech-to-text api available at wit.ai instead of one of the larger products such as google’s speech-to-text. Additionally, they might not have the best of technology available, so whatever I build should work for lower end systems as well.

Research Begins »