Anamary Leal

Evaluating natural interaction techniques in video games

Despite the gaming industrys recent trend for using “natural” interaction techniques, which mimic real world actions with a high level of fidelity, it is not clear how natural interaction techniques affect the player experience. In order to obtain a better understanding, we designed and conducted a study using Mario Kart Wii, a commercial racing game for the Nintendo Wii. We chose this platform due to its seemingly balanced design of both natural and non-natural interaction techniques. Our empirical study of these techniques found that the non-natural interaction techniques significantly outperform their more natural counterparts. We offer three hypotheses to explain our finding and suggest them as important interaction design considerations.

Considerations for the use of commercial video games in controlled experiments

While commercial, off-the-shelf video games have been used often to observe cognitive and social phenomena, few studies have taken advantage of such games as research tools for conducting controlled experiments. Providing evidence that unmodified, commercial video games can be used to conduct gaming evaluations with high levels of both experimental control and ecological validity, we designed and conducted an experiment that utilized Mario Kart Wii to evaluate the effects of natural interaction on player performance. Based on our experience from that experiment, we present several concerns that require attention when using commercial video games as research tools. Providing examples of design decisions and outcomes from our experiment, we identify some of the benefits, drawbacks, and challenges of using such tools.

3DUI 2010 Contest Grand Prize Winners

The 2010 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces ran the symposiums first 3DUI Grand Prize, a contest for innovative, practical solutions to classic 3DUI problems. The authors describe the rationale for the first contest and give an analysis of all submissions. Each categorys winners also discuss their solutions.

Motivating Crowds to Volunteer Neighborhood Data

Organizations invest resources to gather geographical information about cities or neighborhoods. This can help governments or companies identify needed services or city improvements. However, collecting this information can be difficult and expensive. In this study we investigate ways to motivate local crowds to serve as the worlds sensors and provide geographical data about their surroundings. We conduct interviews and a pilot study to understand whether we can motivate people to contribute data about their neighborhoods via games or for the greater social good of helping the neighborhood. Our results provide a glimpse of how people feel about donating neighborhood data given different motivators; they also provide insight into the amount of data people are willing to contribute. We conclude by discussing possible design implications of our findings.

Negotiating Ambiguity in Describing Fabrics Through Technology

Designers using tangible materials like fabric may have a limited verbal language to describe the embodied experience of feeling the material. Taxonomies exist for materials like fabric, but are not served by the population of designers we studied. How can technology be designed to better explore fabric, yet not diminish any existing ambiguities in description? We chose to study both different ways to represent the fabric and different interface designs to explore fabric. We collected many descriptors, in part by crowdsourcing, and asked how designers explored fabric, leveraging off of existing practices. We designed interfaces to evaluate a designers understanding of fabric, with the goal to provide design guidelines on how to design interfaces with ambiguous-important domains.

Poster: Design considerations for fabric-based input for surface design

Fabric is a dynamic, flexible surface material that holds promise to represent many different kinds of surfaces. We explore how we can use such a flexible material as an interactive 3D input device for various kinds of surface design, such as garment and 3D model design. We discuss our fabric-based interactive system and key design considerations for using fabric-based input. In an evaluation of how domain-specific experts use fabric-based input, and how use changes over time, we found that while tracking issues dominated, participants were successful in drawing initial rough sketches of 3D and 2D creations using fabric-based input.