For Soun Hanwong, playing a computer game should go far beyond using a joystick, mouse or keyboard.

The 26-year-old managing director of Picsoft, who was a game addict himself when he was younger, believes that to make games much more fun, players should no longer command games but actually be a part of them.

With this in mind, Soun has pursued a passion to develop a new kind of game which will allow players to take part through their body movements.

"Instead of using a joystick, mouse or keyboard as usual, players just move or adopt various postures to interact with the game, and this makes them feel that they're a part of the game," he says.

Soun began to turn the dream into reality three years ago, when he was a first-year master's-degree student in the Information Engineering Faculty at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology, Lat Krabang. He adapted computer-vision technology to develop a three-dimensional motion-capture game called Disc Devil.

The game is about a battle sport using thrown discs in a fight between two players. Using computer-vision technology, players can move their bodies to control the game's characters. In this way they use the game's interactive system to feel the excitement and thrill of a disc battle.

The technique behind the development is the use of a Web camera to capture the player's movements. Information from the camera is processed by software that analyses each movement by a player.

"We developed the software to recognise body movement," Soun says. "If players move to the right, the game will know that the disc is being thrown from the right and give an interactive response."

The first prototype of Disc Devil came out in 2004 and won the runner-up award in the entertainment and multimedia category of the Thailand ICT Awards (TICTA) in 2005.

Soun says the award inspired him to set up in business with his friends, and Picsoft was established soon afterwards in the hope of developing revolutionary new gaming software by offering players experiences they had never had before.

With the TICTA award backing him, Soun and his friends planned to launch Disc Devil on the Thai market, but they thought again and decided that the game's quality was not yet good enough for commercial purposes, so they developed it further with better graphics, sound and techniques.

After more than a year, Disc Devil is ready for the market, and the young managing director says a launch is planned in the middle of the year.

Coming from an engineering background, Soun admits that when he formed Picsoft he knew nothing about business, so he joined Software Park Thailand's incubation project, where he learnt about doing business.

"From there I realised that when it came to developing commercial products, marketing was a major concern, so I began to change my ways of thinking and pay more attention to marketing, trying to develop products to serve market demand," he says.

With a greater understanding of business practice, Picsoft was recently selected by the National Science and Technology Development Agency to join Thailand Science Park's incubation project. Soun says the company will not only receive support on both product and marketing research but will also gain from knowledge transfer over the next three years.

Though Picsoft was established two years ago, it will start doing real business this year. As a first step, it will launch Disc Devil on the Thai market and hopes soon afterwards to introduce the game on the international market.

"With software products, it's really hard to penetrate the local market because of copyright-violation problems. That's why we have a plan to sell our products abroad as well," Soun says, adding that copyright violation was really hurting the local software business.

"We spend so much time and effort to develop just one software product, and when it hits the market it's copied within the blink of an eye, and that means we end up with nothing to show for our efforts," he says.

He believes the local software business would enjoy better growth if the copyright-violation issue could be tackled.

Apart from Disc Devil, Picsoft has developed technologies for use in a new kind of interactive medium. Computer vision remains the company's core technology for the development.

Its new game-product lines are called Movematic and Visionary. Like Disc Devil, the two new techniques use Web cameras to monitor the players, but instead of capturing only body movement, the system copies real images of the player and puts them into the game, so that players can see themselves really playing a role.

"We've used this Movematic technology to develop a bubble game. Once the camera captures the player's image, he or she appears in the game, using their body movement to try to hit the bubble and interact with the game," Soun says.

Visionary is a step beyond Movematic and is a virtual-world system. Players also appear in the game, but in a real-life virtual world in which they can hear environmental sounds while interacting with virtual objects around them.

Visionary uses something like the blue-screen technique, or colour separation overlay, to separate the background and foreground of a picture, then inserts the foreground, usually a person or an object, into the required background. Soun says that with computer-vision technology added Visionary will allow players to interact with their surrounding as if they are in a real world.

Although intended for use in games, the new technologies also represent a new generation of interactive media, so Picsoft plans to develop them for use in exhibitions, trade fairs and show events, or in shopping centres, by customising the virtual environments to serve different customers' needs.

Soun believes that computer-vision technology will eventually change the way people play and interact with computer games, as well as offering a new interactive medium in which customers can be a part of advertising campaigns.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation