Week 9 Summaries

DART: A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences
 
The thing that clicked with me the most is the aim to shift people’s notion of AR as a technology to AR as a medium. You don’t consider take photos or video from a point-and-shoot as technology, buy maybe shooting from a DSLR may be. Photo editing moved from writing lines of code to awesome authoring tools like Photoshop to even  further simpler tools like Picassa and now to the popular Instagram. As much as you can abstract the user with the technical implementations of a system, the faster it will be to adopt a new “technology” and let them explore using it as a medium to create art or media. That’s the aim behind the DART – the toolkit to create rapid prototypes for AR experiences.
In order to decide what features to add to the toolkit, the approach taken was to identify which were the core tasks that made AR difficult to adopt. The difficult AR programming packages, which hindered non programmers to evaluate ideas. Also the unique problem of having to deal with the virtual and physical worlds needs delicate handling to make it easy for the users.
DART built on top of Macromedia Director, which provides a familiar interface for designers. Along with a drag and drop library of 3d objects, considerations for regular AR tasks like image tracking, marker tracking, occlusions as part of the authoring tool allows to abstract the user from the technical workarounds. The story board sketching is a useful addition to enable quick walkthrough of ideas.
 
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
 
Similar to the DART effort, Alice is an attempt to make 3D graphics programming more accessible to people with limited to no prior programming experience. The concept of authoring tools, that enable people to generate content without the intricate coding know-how exposes the medium to a wider audience. Alice does what App Inventor does for mobile apps. The idea was to avoid heavy scripting and API skills and improve the learnability and usability of the experience. In the paper, users need to create an opening scene and an interface will be there to help them with their following work.
Alice comprises of 3D objects in the scene and simple scripts to move the objects on the screen. The objects are classified using a hierarchy of first class objects i.e. parent objects and secondary objects which form a part of the parent objects. The scripting involved uses simple Python using lot of overloading and simple named functions. One interesting observation in the paper was their evaluation of the fact that people with no experience with 3D graphic programming find it difficult to visualize movement in the XYZ plane. Instead an easy abstraction that made it easier for the users were commands like up/ down left/right. I feel animation packages like Flash (2D) and 3DsMax or After Effects which let users create animations using the keyframe approach and WYSIWYG interfaces where users can drag objects around in space provide the best abstraction to enable newbies. All these packages I mentioned have robust scripting languages which enable programming complex interactions and actions, but am inexperienced user and easily use these packages without having to deal with the scripting.
 
The effect of latency and network limitations on MMORPGs
In this paper, the author uses the example of Everquest 2 to discuss the constraints due to latency in Massaively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). Such games, which thrive on the concept of real time interaction between players in a gaming environment need a good solution to maintain the experience for the users in the game. Some architectures utilized in such MMORPG gaming ecosystems are client server architecture or peer-peer unicasting or peer-peer multicasting.
The network bandwith and the wait times involved in the games are technical limitations which the game designers have to deal with. One way of smartly overcoming the limitations is not by “dealing with it” but instead making it a part of the experience, so that the user does not realize the lag.
In the paper, the approach adopted by the authors was to categorize interactions and build test situations for each. The author describes the 3 setups used – movement and combat, group combat, as well as movement/ environment. Something that was realized was that the effect of latency was more prominent in the combat phase as compared to the movement phase, which is kind of obvious if you think of your experience with games. In combat, when you try to shoot another person who is also a real player, latency can really disrupt the gaming experience. However, in exploratory actions, some latency can easily be overlooked , since split-second interactions are not required.

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