Discussion

The technology for the game has been made as little distracting for the user as possible. According to the article "Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges" by M. Satyanarayanan, invisibility is important in pervasive computing, thus we wanted to use anything but the mouse and keyboard for the game. It is instead controlled by shaking the screen and using your own voice. The player does not even have to turn the hourglass by himself; the game does it for him as soon as it begins. We were not able to hide the head-set for using the speech recognition since it is needed to be close to the mouth to work.

The shaking of the screen also represents the shaking of the letter cubes in the original Boggle game, and speech recognition conviniently replaces having to write down all the words on paper saving both time and effort. Another thing connecting to the original game is that there can be more than one player.

We encountered some problems with the speech recognition software along the way. It did not always work flawlessly as it did not recognize the spoken words, which is plenty annoying when playing such a game. With better software and well-made voice profiles this problem can be solved to some extent.

To sum up this project, anyone enjoying the regular Boggle game will love this version of it, and you do not even have to be used to working with computers to be able to play and enjoy every part of it!