Summaries Week 9
DART : A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences
Dart is a toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences. The paper highlights the problem of why AR is not a medium yet and what are the kind of difficulties in an AR system and ways to cope with them.
The challenges can be classified into three broad categories: design and programming, enabling technology and the implications of working in the physical world. There is lack of simple, flexible programming environments for AR. Programming must be done at too low a level. 3D content is expensive and time-consuming to create. DART supports rapid creation of informal content from 2D storyboards via 3D animatic actors. Other problems dealing with enabling technology are: tracking multiple, unrelated technologies is difficult. Sensing and reasoning technologies are expensive.
The challenge of designing DART was to create a system that matches the authoring style commonly used for complex content by experienced Director developers. DART currently supports 3D models, audio, video-based content and animatic. Common properties, such as local transformations, texture and color, placement in the scene graph, and linkage to trackers can be specified via property pages.
DART takes a significant step toward enabling designers to work with an exciting new medium of AR by focusing on rapid prototyping and early experience testing, and creating an environment which allows designers to work effectively at a physical site. It has been successful in solving the problem of difficult designs exploration, the cause behind the limited AR experience prototyping.
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
Alice is an interesting 3D graphics programming environment for students who have little or no experience in programming. It can used to create animation for story telling, interactive game play or video to share on the web.
In Alice 3-D objects populate a virtual world and students create program to animate the objects. These objects could be plants, animals, people etc. The Alice interface allows students to drag and drop graphic tiles when creating programs. By manipulating objects in virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs taught in an introductory programming course.
The authoring in Alice consists of creating an opening scene with the help of context menus and the Alice command box. After this, the scripting tab that reveals the text editor and a Run Script button is used to script from the opening scene. The rendering software is Microsoft’s Direct 3D Retained Mode and the language used is a general purpose interpreted language called Python.
Formal and informal tests were conducted to understand the problems faced by users. The most distinguishing PI feature Is that Alice allows people to create behavior for three-dimensional objects without using the traditional mathematical names of the coordinate system X, Y and Z. Other observations indicated that typing was hard for most non-typists and any kind of assistance in Alice was appreciated. Shadows and depth cues helped reduce problems of 3D perception.
Alice has been widely used with over 50000 copies being distributed, which goes to show that such a system that was primarily designed for undergraduate student with changes can serve a wider audience.
The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs (A Field Study of Everquest2)
The paper discusses Everquest2 which is a 2nd generation MMORG (massive multilayer online role playing games). The paper evaluates certain latency problems in a field study of Everquest2 and print out possibilities to design MMORPGs in a mobile content.
Everquest2 has no LAN or single player support; it focuses completely on Internet gaming in a zone-based approach. As the game is designed for raid environment the relevant scientific topics refer to the effects of latency for multiple players of the game world, the strategy to cope with massive amounts of players at the same time and the consistency of the game world.
Three main tests were set up to determine the impact of the latency dependent game aspects of player movement and player combat behavior. The movement and combat test indicated the direct reaction of latency for the game world. With more latency the fights took longer. In group combats the latency caused the fights to last longer, players could predict the combat due to the lag.
The game itself had several strategies to cope with latency which made it run smoothly in high latency condition. Also the number of client tests was limited to draw a general conclusion. Keeping this in mind future research is required with tests involving larger groups of people to determine the effects of latency and bandwidth on MMORGPs.
Comments are closed.