[week 8 summaries]
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Games
In this paper, the author summarized nine different pre-patterns that can be applied in designing Handheld AR (HAR). These pre-patterns are: device metaphor, control mapping, design for the seams, world consistency, landmarks, personal presence, living creatures, hiding/revealing information and body constraint.
Those categories are extracted from the relevant games’ features and refined by discussion with experienced designers and researchers. The point of making this prepatterns, from my perspective, is threefold. Firstly, these pre-patterns can serve as references or templates, which means, when the game designer want to implement embodied interactions, they can refer to these classified patterns for guidance. Each pre-pattern describes its attribute and how it works. Based on that, the designer can easily conclude the challenges and context of applying this pre-pattern. Secondly, though HAR games are still in the early stages there the problems are less clear and task-oriented, these pre-patterns can act as a prototype and keep being complete and enriching as the domain develops. At last, by adding new items and modifying old items, these pre-pattern table can be the wiki in AR design. The last but not the lest, the proposal of pre-pattern provide a platform for experience sharing and exchange. By doing that, they can shorten the gaps between different areas in HAR implementation, like between design and development.
In all, these is a meaningful paper. With the HAR game developing, the pre-patterns can play a more and more important role. Also, some other related areas can adopt it to their own technology.
The Task Gallery: A 3D Window Manager
This paper talks about a new window manager that can do both task management and document comparison. By utilizing the concept of gallery, which is familiar for most people, the researchers aim at constructing a new 3D metaphor so that the user can have a enjoyable using experience without struggling with instructions.
Since this design is for achieving better user experience, the researchers try different ways to make the operations and commands look more natural and intuitive for the user to perform. This includes studies about different metaphors and their effects, choosing manipulation controls that are easily understood and implementing the user interfaces according to previous experience and theories.
3 different usability tests are conducted against the system. The former two are run in an environment with mimic tasks and judge from adjust time, spatial representation and organization, and overall rating. Those two tests are run before and after carious usability issues are resolved. And the result shows better positive feedback for the updated one. The third test is conducted in the real system and related to more documents in tasks. The procedure is slightly different from the previous tasks and a ‘icon identification and matching’ task is added. The results shows positive feedback as well.
This paper presents a new windows system that contains 3D interactive elements. Though interesting, I think it has some restrictions. The idea of endless gallery room implies this application cannot achieve good performance on display screen that is not big enough. Also, it is not so applicable for personal usage.
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