Week 8 Summaries
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions
In this paper, the authors want to develop repeatable principles and solutions for handheld AR game design. Their goal is to share experience on designing and evaluating these games. Designers need to think about the new experience that AR can support, as well as the constrains and complexity of the new technology. All the problems can be discussed among AR researchers and game designers.
The term “pre-patterns” is actually another way to call design patterns because HAR games are still young for game field. The authors plan to use this method to summarize existing successful HAR games. After determining the design pattern method, they create a table for nine design patterns with different embodied skills and introduce them one by one in the rest of the paper.
Device metaphors function like a familiar object for users to guild their action. (Windows desktop uses the concept of physical desks). Control mapping is a HAR interaction which can map physical action to actions in the game. Seamful design is a method that can deal with seams in a HAR game by limiting physical actions of players or giving solutions when users are tripped into a seam. World consistency is the principle that the virtual world will obey rules in physical world. Landmarks are used by players to navigate as points of reference. Living creatures are created in the game and they can react to physical events. Players should be able to enhance their personal preference in the game. Body constrains mean one player’s action can constrains to others. Hidden information in the game can be guessed by players with social skills. The authors leave comments and interesting insights for all the design patterns.
Question: which design pattern contributes to the biggest challenge in HAR game field?
Task Gallery
Task gallery is a windows manager that can hang users tasks on the wall in a virtual environment. Their motivation is to help users manage their tasks in a more enjoyable and effective way. In task gallery, the current task is displayed at the front of the gallery and other tasks are hung on the walls or the ceiling. Users can switch the current task by clicking the task they want to work on.
In this paper the authors introduce gallery design, window management, tool space and user testing respectively. For the design part, they use animation to enhance the spatial metaphor. Whenever users switch the current task, there will be a 1-min animation to help users track what is happening. Besides, they also provide a simple navigation system to help users to be more familiar with spatial actions. For the windows management part, they provide multiple visualization of these windows, including a loose stack, an order stack and a selected window set. The authors try to use their tool space to replace traditional metaphor of menus and toolbars.
In order to do their user test, they carried out experiments. Eleven sample users are involved and asked to do several tasks to compare two different iteration prototypes. In another experiment, nine participants join the testing with the version of the system including live windows application. Later they did some statistical work to evaluate their system.
Question: Will people feel dizzy after long time usage of the system due to the 3D feature?
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