Week 8 Summaries
Pre-Patterns for Designing Embodied Interactions in Handheld Augmented Reality Games
This paper aimed to connect AR research and game design communities to help to improve handheld augmented reality game experience. The authors share their from designing and analyzing HAR games by presenting a collection of design pre-pattern for HAR games. Nine most significant pre-patterns which leverage four kinds of embodied human skills are introduced in this paper. In each pattern, they talks about its definition and description, example games and how to using the pre-pattern. The nine pre-patterns are:
Device metaphors: Using metaphor to suggest players’ action where the hand held device should function as a familiar object.
Control mapping: The designer needs to make conscious decisions about how to select the control actions supported by the HAR interface and map them in the game.
Seamful design: Due to the limitations in computer-vision based tracking, the designers need to design the seams to help users when tracking is lost.
World consistency: Designer should create realistic experiences using properties of the real world because a player who experiences a hybrid world always expects the hybrid world have similar principles of the real world.
Landmarks: Using physical-digital landmarks can help players orient and navigate through a game space.
Living creatures: The digital game creature that lives in the physical should be able to react to physical events.
Personal presence: Leveraging the HAR interface in different way can help to enhance players’ personal presence.
Body constrains: Designer should leverage the relative position among players.
Hidden information: Designer should hide some information from users so that player can reveal information through body movements or communication.
The Task Gallery: A 3D Window Manager
This paper introduces a 3D window manger: the Task Gallery, which uses 3D virtual environment to provide task management. The authors first talk about the design of the Task Gallery. Then they provide some evaluation results by conducting usability on the Task Gallery.
The Task Gallery is designed to provide task management as well as window management. They designed the Task Gallery as a 3D virtual environment so that it can more effectively engage spatial cognition and perception. A navigable art gallery like environment was chosen. Current task is displayed on a stage at the end of the art gallery. Other tasks are placed on the walls, floor and ceiling. Tasks can be moved by the users with a dragging movement. Different animations are used to increase the spatial metaphor. To avoid making users get lost in this 3D virtual gallery, the space was designed to maintain simple and the navigation was constrained into several simple controls. To help users distinguish different tasks, each task has a distinct background image.
The Task Gallery was evaluated during the design and implementation by conducting three usability experiments. There experiments gave several interesting results. Users put more tasks on the wall than the ceiling or floor, which suggests that they were using the metaphor to guide interaction. They also found that related tasks were always placed close together on the same surface. During the experiment, participants were told to draw the gallery and the task positions after they finish the operation on the Task Gallery. They found that the hallway was a quadrilateral shape in most participants’ drawing. And participants are more likely to remember the correct depth order of tasks than the tasks had been placed on the left or the right wall. At last, the authors briefly introduce the implementation issues and the future work.
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