week 8 summaries
The Task Gallery
The Task Gallery is unique workspace in virtual environment letting users to be more productive working in 3D environment using working knowledge of human perception. The Task Gallery is a room shaped 3D application that lets users to manage tasks and windows with controlling virtual user in the virtual environment. The Task Gallery implements 8 different actions that virtual user can take in the environment to navigate. The Task Gallery adopted traditional window management controls such as drag to move a window. It also provides various window manipulation controls such as ordered stack, loose stack, and new task. The loose stack is overlapped window and ordered stack is stack of small windows that can be highlighted by a click and focused in main window.
Users are also provided with toolboxes associated with the virtual body. The toolboxes are left of, right of, above, and below the user including the navigations. The Task Gallery provides a unique toolspace called “Start Palette” which shows palette with data mountain when clicked. It works as extension of Start Menu in Windows in 3D environment.
The authors provide 3 experiments to learn how well users can work in this 3D virtual environment. In first two experiments, 11 participants were to do two different iteration tasks in the environment. The result showed that participants placed significantly large amount of tasks on the left and right walls rather than ceiling or floor. In the third experiment, 9 participants were asked to test newer version of system with Windows application. Users’ tendency not to place tasks on the ceiling and the floor stood out more in this experiment.
This paper was interesting trial for creation of useful 3D User Interface. The experimental results could be little different with better computing power and more realistic 3D graphics, but initially showing that the user’s perception affects in case of 3D virtual environment is interesting.
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Games
In this work, the authors try to generate reusable principles of designing HAR games. The authors provide a set of 9 pre-patterns that are indeed design patterns for HAR gaming. The authors describe each pre-patterns and how it works. These pre-patterns are created by evaluating existing AR games iteratively and categorized by similar features. Most of the paper is allocated to describing these 9 pre-patterns.
Device Metaphors – using handheld device as a source of metaphor to other tools, give users the intuition of how to use the given application. For example, Joe Warpin renders sniper lens to metaphor the device as a sniper gun.
Control Mapping – Map a set of physical actions to intuitive actions in the game. For example, In Nerdherder, zooming the device onto nerds scares them away.
Seamful Design – due to limitation of computer vision based tracking, the seam is inevitable. Seamful design takes those seams into account and deal with the seams. For example, when tracking is lost, indicate and make users to point out.
World Consistency – the principles in the virtual world needs to be consistent with the principles in the real world to meet user’s assumption.
Landmarks – using landmarks as point of reference, the users can navigate in the game much more easily.
Personal Presence – make creatures interact directly with user’s action so that user feels to be in the virtual world or controlling the virtual world.
Living Creatures – to make users feel that creatures in game are alive, the creatures needs to react on actions done in real environment.
Body Constraints – design to model body constraints of user to provide more intuitive interface, such as turning device to change option for another player.
Hidden Information – hide some information from users to make it more realistic. For example, in fishing game, a player can steal other player’s fishes. The users tended to infer the state of other player’s boat by observing them without explicit information.
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