Summaries for week 8
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Game
Today’s game industry evolves towards intuitive or AR games, which do not require additional skills from the player. This paper focuses on Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR) where virtual content is added to the real world thanks to an embodied video camera, and describes how these games evolved, which interfaces exist and their limits.
Unlike classical games, where everything is virtual, HAR games developers have to know which interactions players are likely to be familiar with. This is why nine design pre-patterns have been created to know which characteristics are efficient to make the game immersive and enjoyable, in addition to more common concepts which purposes are safety and gameplay.
First, device metaphors are the representation of the device as another object. Control mapping is about interface for actions and their effect in the game, and the way to give pleasure to the player. The third pre-pattern is seamful design, which is designed to handle limitations of the technology and keep the game enjoyable despite of them. Then, the world consistency is supposed to improve the immersion of the player, whether physics law are applied or not, but the world has to be coherent. Landmarks aim to give the user meaningful objects so that one can knows where he is and where to go. The sixth pre-pattern is living creatures which is meant to integrate characters that seem real and interacting with environment. Personal presence is the quality for the user of having the impression to belong to the game. The next pre-pattern is body constraints, which is aimed to take into account the relative positions among players so that possible actions are appropriate. Finally, hidden information is the art of displaying information in a certain context or after a certain action.
The main future work is to enlarge the list of patterns and to create a wiki to share this knowledge. However, the nine patterns identified and described here are meant to be used by the game industry, the next generation of video games will show whether they have been useful are not.
The Task Gallery: A 3D Window Manager
Nowadays, most of the users work on several tasks at a time and need to switch between them. Therefore, this paper presents a prototype of 3D environment to see several windows at a time and easily switch.
Several researches, in 3D or not, have already been done in this done since it is an old issue, but none of them was either efficient either relevant, except Web Forager and Data Mountain which showed the importance of 3D in spatial representation. The design chosen here is an art gallery, with the active windows on stage. Users can manipulate windows by dragging them, icon controls are also displayed when one points to a window. Tasks can also be managed with toolspaces containing tools and objects.
In order to evaluate the efficiency of the task gallery, three experiments have been led. The first two ones concerned two different prototypes using images of applications instead of live ones, whereas the third experiment involved the final version. Once the subjects were familiar with the environments, they went through several experiments, then had to draw what the hall looked like for them and where it was located, and finally filled out a survey. The metaphor of an art gallery seemed satisfying since users drew it as supposed to be and mainly used the walls to store the applications. Also, feedback was positive.
Thus, this 3D environment seems to be immersive and consistent. Several future improvements are planned, like providing better landmarks for the users to find the tasks they stored or integrating the task gallery in the Windows environment. But one of the first integration of this application manager would be smartphones, since most of them contain a huge number of applications and users often switch between them, perhaps in an augmented reality system. Will it be the next step in managing windows?
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