Week 9 Summaries
DART: A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences
DART, built on top of Macromedia Director, is a toolkit to address significant problems faced by designers working with augmented reality in the real world. Over the past years, AR researchers have done a lot of work to shift people’s thought from AR as technology to AR as media. However, challenges in this area still remain and researchers need a predictable, understandable, well documented and powerful tool to help them work directly and effectively with AR. Thus DART came to the world. In this paper, three main contributions are made:
1. to identify the problems that make AR difficult to work with.
The problems include : Programming environments of AR are neither simple nor flexible. It is too difficult to deal with unrelated tracking technology. It is not easy to deal with the relationship between the physical world and virtual world.
2. to argue for importance of integrating research tools and share experiences.
Designers’ work with AR was often far less technically and conceptually refined. Many projects reported in conference never make theoretical or early design into prototypes.
3. to come up with a collection of design features of DART.
DART uses an object-oriented language named Lingo. Its environment includes a stage, multiple casts (content elements warehouse), a score (timeline) and sprites (store content elements on stage). Director can generate graphical interface for editing behavior. New features of DART and how it works are also introduced in this section.
Question: What is the difference between “Cue and Actions event system” and event listener in Java Script?
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
Alice is a 3D graphics programming environment designed for people who do not have 3D graphics or programming experience but need to work on it. It is a tool to create time-based and interactive behavior instead of creating 3D models. The goal of the designers are to make 3D graphics accessible widely. So they need to pay attention to user’s needs, usability of the environment and evaluation of their work.
Later the authors give some instructions and sample code on how to use Alice. Users need to create an opening scene and an interface will be there to help them with their following work. Context menu, command box and scripting are the main tools for designers to realize their what they are thinking about.
In the next section, how to implement Alice is talked about. Some work related rendering, python, animation engine are finished to support the objective of the programming environment.
Finally, the designers carry out some tests to evaluate the system. 100 subjects are involved in the experiment and some data during usage is collected to do some statistical work so that some findings are made, such as the death of 3D coordinate system, the relationship between objects and parts, as well as some functions beyond traditional ones.
Question: Does it mean that designers can finish all the AR tasks without the help of programmers? Is it possible for this kind of tool to replace traditional programming environment completely?
The effect of latency and network limitations on MMORPGs
This paper gives a brief history of MMORPGs, evaluates latency problems and talk about possibilities to design them in mobile content.
I’d like to skip the history of online games here. In their research, they focus on Everquest 2 as an example for a 2nd generation of MMORPG. The game has raid environment so that the effect of latency has a big influence on players’ experience, especially when multiple users play together. The authors use these methods to do the research:
1. Point out and categorize game interactions and design tests accordingly.
2. Build test environment that can affect game latency.
3. Perform a fitting tests for important aspect of the game.
Later three main tests are set up, they are movement and combat, group combat, as well as movement/ environment. They did analysis for each test. They use figures and data to support their conclusions. Network level, user quality for tests are also taken into consideration. Finally they write a paragraph to talk about the possibility to design MMORPG in mobile content, which has been already realized nowadays.
In fact the effect of game latency is still a big problem for online game at present. But now the problem is mainly about network condition and amount of online players, instead of the game itself. Players can choose to low down the quality of image to decrease the latency, but they cannot determine the amount of users that are supported by one server, and they have to play with others so that the local data transmission becomes very tense.
Question: Why do you choose Everquest 2 as an example instead of World of Warcraft?
Comments are closed.