Summary Week 9
DART : A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences
The paper describes the Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit. It summarizes the most significant problems faced by designers working with AR in the real world, and discusses how DART addresses them. It was a collaborated effort with new-media designers shifting from “AR as Technology” to “AR as medium”
There are three main contributions of this paper including identifying a collection of problems that make AR a particularly difficult medium to work with, integrating research tools with existing commercial authoring software and support features to DART for better design. DART classes the challenges faced broadly in into the categories of design and programming, enabling technology and dealing with the workings in the physical world.
Live video, visual marker tracking, overhead tracking has been included in the Macromedia Director. Designers can drag and drop media elements such 3D models and links to tracker can be placed in the physical world. These properties can quickly be modified n the pop-up window. Quick prototype and testing is an important feature in DART.
Other features include modeling physical objects, occlusion of physical objects on virtual objects, synchronized capture and playback of video, tracking and other sensor data. It also supports story board sketching to sketch quick content in order to test experiences in physical space. All in all, DART tried to create an exciting new medium of AR for designers.
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
Alice is a 3D graphics programming environment designed for undergraduates with no 3D graphics or programming experience. By created authoring tools that made 3D graphics accessible to a wider audience Alice achieved something that current 3D tools could not.
The design principles were: choosing a target audience, avoid math and cryptic notation in the API and test design with real users, improving both learnability and usability of the system. The observations and conclusions came from formal and informal observations of hundreds of users.
The authoring consisted of two phases: creating an opening scene by selecting objects from an object gallery displayed by clicking the add object button and secondly scripting, once the objects and camera is in position the initial state is saved into a world file. The user interactively edits the script and runs it from the saved opening scene.
Observations sessions were conducted using the two-person talk-aloud protocol. During a 30 minute session, pairs of users worked through the Alice tutorial. It was observed that novice users are strongly influenced by surface issues and name choices were important to make the API clear and non-confusing. Typing was harder, few users and a problem in the 3D perception, the subjects had high expectation for collision detection and gravity properties of objects and users tended to use “1” for a variety of data types.
Although originally designed for undergraduates, it was observed that many middle and high school children were able to build interactive 3D graphic models using Alice.
The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs (A Field Study of Everquest2)
One of the current game evolutions is creating massive virtual environment, so called MMORGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). These game types open a completely new set of problems due to their large number of players, multi- server architecture latency due to large number of players.
Two main game structures exist namely: zone based structure that separates the whole game world into different zones. The disadvantage of this is the loading time between each zone. The second way is implementing a seamless environment, where zone borders do not exist. The disadvantage in this is the high programming complexity and growing traffic in case of events in the border zones.
The paper focuses on Everquest2, a 2nd Generation of MMORG. It is an Internet game with the zone based approach. The goal of the game is to gain experience and a higher character level, better equipment and more players to beat bigger monsters and reach restricted areas. The effects of latency were tested by firstly categorizing interactions and building test situations. Then building a test environment to test the influence the latency has and finally performing a fitting test for important game aspects.
The latency dependent game aspects player movement and player combat behavior. For movement and combat, the hypothesis that more latency that occur, cause fights to take longer was partially correct with the breakpoint occurring at 1250 ms. For group combat it was proved that combat time grew proportionally with latency. For movement / environment the players own movement were rendered instantly even under latency condition.
To conclude due to the limited number of test clients there is not enough information for a generalized conclusion. Larger groups are required to have a comprehensive study of the same.
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