Pole-with-a-catch: A force-based portable system for delivering the experience of pole fishing

Abstract

Although fishing is a highly social activity, it is difficult to invite a new person into fishing due to the difficulty of letting a beginner know its fun. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Pole-with-a-Catch, a portable system that aims to easily provide the core fun of fishing experience by imitating the force of a fish through a fishing pole. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first portable system to replicate fishing experience via force. We aimed to design and build a portable, realistic force-based, and easy-to-learn system, and we have tackled two major technical challenges preceding its realization. First, we needed to provide a method to generate a directional force with a portable device. We overcame this by building a device that exerts directional forces by asymmetric oscillations. Second, we needed to gather various force patterns of fish and represent these with the portable force generator, which cannot properly express a continuous force. We addressed this by first developing a force fish measuring device to gather the force patterns of fish, and then introducing a special mapping between the fish’s force and the force generator’s oscillation. Our experiments have shown that the mapping used in Pole-with-a-Catch was successful at representing the varying force of fish with the force generation device. Our user study suggests that the users felt the feeling of force fun and Pole-with-a-Catch is able to invite new people into fishing. Moreover, it proposed multiple possible applications of the system for other uses, such as a substitute for actual fishing for experienced anglers.