Connecting Power and Play: Investigating Interactive Energy Harvesting in Battery-Free Gaming

Paper Title

Connecting Power and Play: Investigating Interactive Energy Harvesting in Battery-Free Gaming

Publication Info

• Topic area: Sustainable interaction design in battery-free gaming systems.
• Keywords: Battery-free computing, energy harvesting, gaming interaction, intermittent power, crank input, modular design, user study, sustainability, ergonomics, seamful design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: The reliance on batteries in mobile gaming devices poses environmental and design challenges. Existing battery-free gaming systems are limited in energy-harvesting capacity, application complexity, and usability, with power failures often treated as disruptions rather than opportunities.
• Significance: Addressing these challenges could reduce environmental impact, enable sustainable gaming, and inspire new interaction paradigms that integrate energy harvesting into gameplay.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work demonstrated the feasibility of battery-free gaming but focused on overcoming power loss rather than embracing it as part of the interaction. Existing systems lack modularity, logging capabilities, and sophisticated integration of energy harvesting with gameplay. This paper builds on these gaps by exploring how energy harvesting can shape user behavior and interaction design.

Solution

• Proposed approach: TURNER, a modular, battery-free handheld gaming console powered by a crank and solar cells, designed to integrate energy harvesting with gameplay and study user interaction under intermittent power conditions.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of TURNER, a modular, crank- and solar-powered gaming console with integrated interaction logging.
  2. Insights from the first user study on a battery-free, intermittently powered gaming console, revealing strategies for designing interactive battery-free systems.
  3. Design guidelines for integrating energy harvesting into gameplay, including flexible input remapping and dynamic context-aware applications.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • TURNER features a modular architecture with detachable components for easy upgrades and maintenance.
  • A lightweight custom kernel ensures reliability under intermittent power and supports modular application development.
  • Three console configurations were tested: battery-free with crank input (BF/CI), battery-free without crank input (BF/NCI), and battery-powered with crank input (BP/CI).
  • A mixed-methods user study (N=60) evaluated user behavior, workload, and perceptions across these configurations using gameplay, questionnaires, and interviews.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • BF/CI users exhibited more frequent but less intense cranking compared to BF/NCI users, who performed longer, higher-power cranking bursts.
  • No significant differences in perceived workload or intention to use the system were found between battery-free and battery-powered configurations.
  • Participants reframed power failure as part of gameplay, describing it as a "game within a game."
• Advantage over baselines:
  • TURNER outperformed prior battery-free systems in modularity, energy harvesting capacity, and integration of harvesting with gameplay.
  • The crank input added novel gameplay mechanics, particularly in DOOM, where it was used to fire a weapon.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Three console configurations were tested across three games (DOOM levels A and B, Tetris) in a controlled indoor environment.
  • Data collection included system logs, NASA-TLX workload scores, HMSAM questionnaire responses, and semi-structured interviews.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Short session durations and controlled indoor settings limited ecological validity.
  • The sample lacked younger participants and was not diverse.
  • Ergonomic issues with the crank and console design were noted, including size, weight, and noise.
  • Future work should explore alternative energy-harvesting mechanisms, longitudinal studies, and more intuitive mappings between harvesting and gameplay.

Summary

This paper introduces TURNER, a modular, battery-free gaming console powered by a crank and solar cells, to explore how energy harvesting affects user interaction and gameplay. A 60-participant study revealed that integrating energy harvesting into gameplay shapes user behavior, with participants reframing power failures as part of the gaming experience. While no significant differences in workload or intention to use were found between battery-free and battery-powered configurations, TURNER demonstrated the potential for sustainable, engaging battery-free gaming. Future work should address ergonomic challenges, explore alternative harvesting methods, and design adaptive, context-aware systems.