Julian Frommel

ShareVR: Enabling Co-Located Experiences for Virtual Reality between HMD and Non-HMD Users

Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) allow for a highly immersive experience and are currently becoming part of the living room entertainment. Current VR systems focus mainly on increasing the immersion and enjoyment for the user wearing the HMD (HMD user), resulting in all the bystanders (Non-HMD users) being excluded from the experience. We propose ShareVR, a proof-of-concept prototype using floor projection and mobile displays in combination with positional tracking to visualize the virtual world for the Non-HMD user, enabling them to interact with the HMD user and become part of the VR experience. We designed and implemented ShareVR based on the insights of an initial online survey (n=48) with early adopters of VR HMDs. We ran a user study (n=16) comparing ShareVRto a baseline condition showing how the interaction using ShareVR led to an increase of enjoyment, presence and social interaction. In a last step we implemented several experiences for ShareVR, exploring its design space and giving insights for designers of co-located asymmetric VR experiences.

Evaluating VR Driving Simulation from a Player Experience Perspective

The majority of HCI research in the field of automotive interfaces and driver-vehicle interaction is conducted utilizing driving simulators. High-fidelity simulators are expensive; in consequence, many researchers use consumer gaming hardware and flat screens as an alternative. In recent years VR devices have become affordable and are applied already in some driving studies. It has not been shown whether driving simulations can use VR to increase immersion in low-cost setups. We conducted a pilot study with 20 participants using a racing game as simulation software. The results of this pilot study indicate that using a VR headset can potentially dissociate participants to a higher degree from the real world compared to the use of flat screens. However, participants felt a higher discomfort using the VR HMD. Despite expectations, todays VR technology does not appear to be a generally better choice than flat screens for driving simulator studies.

Rising to the Challenge: An Emotion-Driven Approach Toward Adaptive Serious Games

Serious games are steadily becoming a powerful tool for educational purposes as their challenging characteristics are suggested to make them particularly appealing to learn with. This challenging nature, however, comes at a price, namely, the need to maintain the optimal balance according to players’ emotional experiences. By focusing on players’ emotions as main player characteristic considered to be important for learning processes and performance, this chapter surveys empirical research and current game development that contributes to an emotion-adaptive framework for games. The goal of this chapter is to clarify the importance of continuously adjusting game characteristics to players’ emotional states. As the interaction between game characteristics and players’ emotions highlights the need for continuously assessing at what point gameplay becomes more or less positively or negatively affected, methods for emotion recognition are presented. A summary of adaptable game design elements as well as implementation methods for adaptivity are provided.

2084 -- Safe New World: Designing Ubiquitous Interactions

This paper investigates a concept for highly ubiquitous game interactions in pervasive games. Pervasive gaming is increasingly popular, but steadily improving mobile and ubiquitous technologies (e.g. smartwatches) have yet to be utilised to their full potential in this area. For this purpose, we implemented 2084 Safe New World; a pervasive game that allows particularly ubiquitous gameplay through micro interactions of varying duration. In a lab study, different interaction techniques based on gestures and touch input were compared on two mobile devices regarding usability and game input observability. A second study evaluated the player experience under more realistic circumstances; in particular, it examined how well the game can be integrated into everyday life, and tested boundaries of social acceptance of ubiquitous interactions in a pervasive spy game.

Modeling and Evaluating a Bayesian Network of Culture-Dependent Behaviors

Anthropomorphic user interfaces such as virtual agents or humanoid robots aim on simulating believable human behavior. As human behavior is influenced by diversifying factors such as cultural background, research in anthropomorphic user interfaces considers culture background for their behavioral models as well. This paper presents a hybrid approach of creating a culture-specific model of non-verbal behaviors for simulated dialogs based on both: theoretical knowledge and empirical data. Therefore, the structure and variables of a Bayesian network are designed based on models and theories from the social sciences, while its parameters are learned from a video corpus of German and Japanese conversations in first time meeting scenarios. To validate the model a 10-fold-cross-validation has been conducted, suggesting that with the model culture-specific behavior can automatically be generated for some of the investigated behavioral aspects.

Mobile Augmented Reality as an Orientation Aid: A Scavenger Hunt Prototype

Orientation in public environments is a critical skill for new arrivals, yet also one that is usually only learned gradually through trial and error. This paper suggests the use of pervasive augmented reality (AR) for the design of a serious game that teaches navigational skills in a public environment. Many AR scavenger hunt games confront players with new environments by default, however they rarely focus explicitly on teaching navigational skills. We propose a concept that utilises augmented reality techniques for increased immersion and motivation, while upholding the real-world sense of presence for an easy transfer of orientation skills to everyday life. For this purpose, we implemented a first prototypical serious game in the form of an AR scavenger hunt. A preliminary evaluation regarding its usability produced promising results. As such, the prototype constitutes a first proof of concept. In future iterations, it will be further developed as an adaptive AR serious game, and evaluated in respect to its efficacy in teaching orientation and navigation skills.

Effects of controller-based locomotion on player experience in a virtual reality exploration game

Entertainment and in particular gaming is currently considered one of the main application scenarios for virtual reality (VR). The majority of current games rely on any form of locomotion through the virtual environment while some techniques can lead to simulator sickness. Game developers are currently implementing a wide variety of locomotion techniques to cope with simulator sickness (e.g. teleportation). In this work we implemented and evaluated four different controller-based locomotion methods that are popular in current VR games (free teleport, fixpoint teleport, touchpad-based, automatic). We conducted a user study (n = 24) in which participants explored a virtual zoo with these four different controller-based locomotion methods and assessed their effects on discomfort, presence, enjoyment, and affective state. The results of our study show that free teleport locomotion elicited least discomfort and provided the highest scores for enjoyment, presence, and affective state. With these results we gained valuable insights for developers and researchers implementing first person locomotion in VR experiences.

KickAR: Exploring Game Balancing Through Boosts and Handicaps in Augmented Reality Table Football

When player skill levels are not matched, games provide an unsatisfying player experience. Player balancing is used across many digital game genres to address this, but has not been studied for co-located augmented reality (AR) tabletop games, where using boosts and handicaps can adjust for different player skill levels. In the setting of an AR table football game, we studied the importance of game balancing being triggered by the game system or the players, and whether player skill should be required to trigger game balancing. We implemented projected icons to prominently display game balancing mechanics in the AR table football game. In a within-subjects study (N=24), we found players prefer skill-based control over game balancing and that different triggers are perceived as having different fairness. Further, the study showed that even game balancing that is perceived as unfair can provide enjoyable game experiences. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions for player balancing in AR tabletop games.

Conveying the Perception of Kinesthetic Feedback in Virtual Reality using State-of-the-Art Hardware

Including haptic feedback in current consumer VR applications is frequently challenging, since technical possibilities to create haptic feedback in consumer-grade VR are limited. While most systems include and make use of the possibility to create tactile feedback through vibration, kinesthetic feedback systems almost exclusively rely on external mechanical hardware to induce actual sensations so far. In this paper, we describe an approach to create a feeling of such sensations by using unmodified off-the-shelf hardware and a software solution for a multi-modal pseudo-haptics approach. We first explore this design space by applying user-elicited methods, and afterwards evaluate our refined solution in a user study. The results show that it is indeed possible to communicate kinesthetic feedback by visual and tactile cues only and even induce its perception. While visual clipping was generally unappreciated, our approach led to significant increases of enjoyment and presence.

VRSpinning: Exploring the Design Space of a 1D Rotation Platform to Increase the Perception of Self-Motion in VR

Current approaches for locomotion in virtual reality are either creating a visual-vestibular conflict, which is assumed to cause simulator sickness, or use metaphors such as teleportation to travel longer distances, lacking the perception of self motion. We propose VRSpinning, a seated locomotion approach based around stimulating the users vestibular system using a rotational impulse to induce the perception of linear self-motion. In a first study we explored the approach of oscillating the chair in different frequencies during visual forward motion and collected user preferences on applying these feedback types. In a second user study we used short bursts of rotational acceleration to match the visual forward acceleration. We found that this rotational stimulus significantly reduced simulator sickness and increased the perception of self-motion in comparison to no physical motion.