Week 8 Summaries
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Games
This paper is very interesting according to me, because it attempts at doing something novel. The motivation behind the paper is to formalize the design of AR games by coming up with various pre-patterns to bridge the gap between interaction and game design. The problem at hand is different from software engineering design patterns because it is not as clear and task-oriented.
The advantage of this are many, firstly it brings the game designers and AR researchers under one roof. It also formalizes the constraints and complexities involved in making HAR applications. The aim is to use the pre-patterns to leverage the skills of the player and create the gameplay experience such that it can take advantage of the embodied interaction enabled by the HAR interface. There are 9 design pre-patterns namely device metaphors, control mapping, seamful design, world consistency, landmarks, personal presence, living creatures, body constraints and hidden information. The purpose of these design patterns is to summarize existing practices that are successful and significant and encapsulate knowledge in a common format. Since the HAR games are still in their early stages of development the authors have used the term pre-patterns instead of pattern.
For instance the device metaphor pre-pattern illustrates how easily a new controller can be learnt if it can take up the metamorphic role of a known object like racquet or bat. The control mapping pre-pattern is used for both game controls and design trade-offs as well. The lessons learnt can be applied to non-gaming applications as well.
Since, these patterns are fairly recent the game design and research communities through various application will ultimately determine if these patterns are useful. But they are good enough to start off with and with incremental improvements, modifications and better understanding it will be possible to move towards the formalized design pattern for games from the existing pre-pattern.
This will be a hard problem to solve because HAR is more user based and intuitive in nature compared to the rest. And I wonder if there ever will be a formal approach accepted widely. This question is something to ponder on.
The Task Gallery: A 3D Window Manager
The paper describes “The Task Gallery” which is a window manager that uses interactive 3D graphics to provide support for task management and document comparison. The user’s tasks appear as artwork hanging on walls of a virtual art gallery, with the selected task on stage. The user switches to a new task by clicking on it which moves it on to the stage.
Important things are placed at the center and the application takes advantage of the human spatial memory understanding where front-back relations are easier to remember and represent than left-right relations. The advantages are many, you can select multiple applications place them side by side arrange them the way you want. There is no need to resize them when switching. They can also be in the form of stacks which display the application snapshot that can be reordered as required.
A lot of effort has gone in to make the system as user friendly as possible. Users use on screen controls or keyboard commands to navigate. Sound has been added to create an illusion of objects moving through space. The Task Gallery makes use of toolspaces on the all four sides of the user, which hold various tools or objects, associated to the virtual body as it moves in the virtual environment. The Left toolspace contains the “Start Palette” which contains the user’s favorite applications in the form of a snapshot on the palette.
Tests were conducted for both the prototype and the live version of the Task Gallery and the results showed that the users were satisfied. Important feedback from the study were that participants did not like the idea of tasks on the floor. Also tasks on the floor and on ceiling were difficult to read because of the angle in the live experiment. There are a few challenges that lie ahead, for instance getting existing applications to work in the 3D environment without changing or recompiling. Also, finding a way of getting the state of open files and sub-windows within an application.
The Task Gallery was tried few years ago, it is strange that we don’t see any 3D graphics support for task management in the current generation of desktops considering the increasing use of diverse and multiple applications that are used by users these days. Why is it so?
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