Week 8 Summaries
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Games
The authors suggest that HAR technology can be used to create fun and compelling HAR games if the designers can correctly leverage users existing physical and social skills to interact with the system and with other players. So the authors summarize their experience in designing and teaching HAR game design and the design lessons they have learned over the years through a set of 9 design pre-patterns. These pre-patterns examine the tight relationship between the HAR interface and play experience. These pre-patterns were generated through an iterative process that included extracting relevant games’ features and refining them by discussion with experienced designers and researchers. Each pre-pattern includes a title, definition, description, examples and the challenges and context to keep in mind while actually applying the pattern to a game. The different patterns are:
- Device metaphors suggest that the handheld device should function as a familiar object from everyday life so that the users can easily relate to the game actions.
- Control mapping suggests that the designers should use physical actions that intuitively map to game actions. For instance if the game play involves pointing and aiming ray casting mechanic seems most appropriate or shaking the device to create similar movements in the virtual world such as earthquake.
- Seamful Design suggests that designers should keep in mind the limitations of the technology and incorporate ways to deal with technology failures. For instance if tracking is lost, the game should clearly indicate the same to the user or create a gameplay in which the user is required to perform actions from a certain distance best for tracking.
- World Consistency refers to designers choosing whether their game will create realistic experiences by obeying the physical laws and properties of the real world or defy user expectations creating surprise and challenge for the players.
- Landmarks suggest that to facilitate navigation in hybrid space the designers should include physical-digital landmarks as they will serve as external reference points and help users better understand the relationship between physical and virtual world.
- Living creatures suggest that virtual characters should react to physical events and user actions to create an illusion that the virtual creature truly lives in the physical space.
- Personal presence suggests leveraging the AR interface to make the player feel that he is living/present in the game world.
- Body constraints suggest that a rich social experience can be created by taking the relative position of various players into account.
- Hidden information suggests encouraging players to leverage their bodily co-presence and social skills to hide and reveal their game information to other players in turn creating suspense and tension in the game.
They hope that these design pre-patterns will give designers basic building blocks for their games, help designers avoid common mistakes and understand how the HAR technology can be used to create experience that are natural, intuitive, more social and emotionally engaging. These patterns can serve as a foundation to form a pattern language for designing AR games and I feel that this paper can truly guide novice AR game developers in designing fun and compelling HAR games.
The task gallery: a 3D window manager
The Task Gallery is a unique window manager that allows users to easily view and interact with multiple documents/windows by creating a virtual 3D environment which is room-shaped. The user can intuitively switch between different windows and arrange the windows in ways that increase user’s productivity. The user is represented as a virtual human in the 3d environment and can navigate by performing 8 different actions. The user can drag and drop different windows in various 3d locations. In this environment, the current task is displayed in the center whereas all other tasks are displayed on the wall, floor and ceiling. It also allows users to display multiple documents side by side as well as scale them intuitively. It allows users to place the task windows onto mounted pieces of artwork so that the tasks can be easily identified. It also provides various controls such as ordered stack, loose stack and new task. Various animation and sound effects are used to provide spatial cues and feedback.
The navigation is limited by on-screen toolbox or keyboard inputs to prevent a novice user from being lost in the 3D space. The Left tool space contains the “Start Palette” which contains the user’s favorite applications in the form of a snapshot on the palette. The Task gallery relies on spatial framework for encoding location information and front/back relationships.
The authors carried out different tests to better know how users behave and act in the environment, understand how spatial memory helps in locating objects in 3D environment and then used the results to refine their design. The goal of the first 2 tests was to better understand how people behave in the environment while the third test was carried to know how users responded to the new version of the system. These experiments highlighted users’ tendency not to place tasks on the ceiling and the floor and helped designer fix usability errors.
Considering today’s technology advancement I feel that such a task gallery with intuitive gesture based inputs can be very useful for presentations and collaborative tasks. I wonder why such applications haven’t been commercially available yet.
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