“You’re it!‿: Role Identification using Pairwise Interactions in Tag Games

We aim at designing interactive playgrounds that automatically analyze the behavior of children while playing games, in order to adapt the gameplay and make the games more engaging. In this paper, we focus on recognizing roles in tag games, where children are taggers or runners. We start by tracking the location and motion of individual players, and subsequently recognize pairwise interactions: approach, chase and avoid. At each moment in time, we inspect the full set of pairwise interactions to determine the role of each player. Our approach is fully probabilistic, deals with any number of players and can easily be extended to include other interactions and roles. We evaluate our algorithm using simulations, which show promising results. We intend to extend our framework to recognize variants of the tag game, and to address actual play interactions.