AR For the Masses: authoring tools and gaming considerations
The prevailing theme of these three papers taken in combination is, I summarize, users can surprise you. When the prevailing metaphors of a given software environment change in their essential nature, it is important for software developers and scientists to approach the problem from a fresh angle.
Take for example the Alice paper. In this report, the authors describe the outcomes of long term and ongoing interaction and study of the users of their 3D programming tool. Alice was designed for a special audience, young or inexperienced users. By evaluating and responding to these users feedback, the researchers were able to a more complete and useful understanding of how the average person (a non-scientist or non-programmer) mentally imagines 3D interactions. They found that features of the Python language such as case-sensitivity were confusing, so they made it case-insensitive. They found that treating a scene and the passage of time in an egocentric and step-wise fashion made it more useful.
For example, Alice may be capable of scene control with finer resolution than one second steps. However, by keeping a reserve of frames protected, they could create animated layers of undo, and animations of the scene transitions which resulted in undesired behavior. Producing high resolution ‘mistakes’ proved to be more useful to the learning users rather than simply hiding the previous steps that led to unintended animations. When designing a high level programming toolkit, abstraction to useful naming is useful as well. The toolkit should speak the language of the users. However, there are nice side effects of this that benefit the developers as well. By reserving some of the functionality or choosing to implement simpler data structures, the users have a simpler metaphor while the developers have more of a buffer of performance overhead as well. This makes the system more predictable and robust.
There were plenty of other insights offered in the Alice paper. Among them, the support for egocentric coordinate systems, LOGO style relative directions, and common-language friendly scaling of value spaces such as move, nudge, and 0.0 to 1.0 scaling of partial steps.
The DART paper reports some similar style results as the Alice research. Namely, that there is a lack of good tools for simplified development of AR media, and that the creation of effective tools that the designer and media generation community can use and understand will contribute to overall literacy and usage, then it can help further developments in the field. The DART paper states three primary categories of difficulties with AR tools: design and programming, enabling technology, and the implications of working in the physical world. The first is about the lack of tools, the difficulty of using what tools exist, and the programming challenges of developing new tools. Enabling technology and real world implications consist of the AR consideration that are unique to that domain, and the challenge is: how do we build on the existing communities of talented designers while sheilding them from the inherent difficulties of AR.
By working within the context of an add-on to Director, DART opens up the possibilities for AR media creation. It makes sacrifices in overall performance in order to earn acceptance by being part of an existing media creation tool. This project eventually demonstrated that you can get successful results with difficult technologies by building on existing standard tools as frames of reference.
In the final paper for this week, the authors review the challenges inherent in MMOGs and the role that network layer problems can have in gameplaying experience. Most important in their research is the finding that, even though designers should work to alleviate and program around these difficulties, in the real world, players compensate aggressively to counteract those problems. When latency becomes an issue, players use alternate strategies to make the most of the situation. A design consideration should therefore be to allow latency or other unavoidable circumstances to degrade gameplay gracefully. As well, game interactions should reflect real world situations.. a high activity map might have in-game bottlenecks that offer a scripted reasoning for why level capacity is limited.
These themes are commonly seen in the novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Introducing the older adults to the concept of wearing, the visual degredation and overlap handling in the novels game environments, and the emergent nature of programming controls when using gesture based interfaces are all relevant imaginings or envisionings of the impact on design of complex systems for human communities of users in the real world.
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