R Remco Magielse

Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.

HeartBeat: an outdoor pervasive game for children

This paper reports the design of a pervasive game for children to demonstrate the design vision of Head-Up games, a genre of pervasive games that puts outdoors play center stage, combining the benefits of traditional outdoor games with the opportunities for richer experiences and innovation offered by new media. The design of the game, called HeartBeat, explores the use of physiological sensing and more specifically heart rate measurement as input to the game and as an approach to enhance the pervasive gaming experience. Evaluation with 32 children outdoors showed how the game promotes physical activity and social interaction between children in ways one would expect from traditional outdoor games.

A design approach to socially adaptive lighting environments

Historically light has been a catalyst for social life to emerge. In recent years of lighting research the social effect of light has been underexposed. The environments we occupy on a daily basis are used for a wider variety of activities. Consequently, lighting conditions need to become sensitive to adapt to the variety of activities being performed. We argue that the effect of light on the social relations between people needs to be considered in order to make adaptive lighting environments viable. To design a socially adaptive lighting environment an approach needs to be used that is iterative, experiential and involves multiple users in an actual context. The design process is described in three stages (Interactive Sketching, a Design Experiment and Socially Situated Adaptive Experience); for each stage the aims, the setup, results and lessons learned are provided. In this process an experimental environment is used, named Incubation environment, which is set up as a dining environment and equipped with computer controllable lighting armatures. In the final design stage the Socially Situated Adaptive Experience technique is described and is found a suitable technique to design socially adaptive lighting environments.

Future lighting systems

Contemporary lighting systems may consist of many individual light sources that can be controlled on various parameters (e.g. intensity, colour, spatial position). Therefore, opening up freedom of control to the user in a comprehensive manner is a challenge. We present a lighting system with three different interfaces that suit different usage scenarios in terms of control effort and freedom. The system consists of modular ceiling tiles for down-lighting and colored wall-washing for atmospheric lighting. The LightPad allows people to quickly adjust all light sources with an expressive touch; duration and force determine respectively the light color and intensity. This could be used near the entrance of a space to quickly set the lighting. The LightCube allows users to choose between various presets that are related to different activities. The top-facing preset is activated. The LightApp is a tablet interface that allows users to control many light sources in detail using simple gestures: dragging, pinching, rotating and wiping. This could be used to create specific atmospheres, or to create presets for the LightCube.

Lithne -- A Platform for Interaction Designers to Develop Interactive Networked Environments

Designing intelligent environments is a complex, interdisciplinary process, performed by experts from different domains. These intelligent environments often consist of wireless sensor/actuator nodes that together form a network to achieve certain goals. While there are many prototyping tools and wireless nodes available, there are few that are suitable for use in interdisciplinary projects for people with varying backgrounds. We identify the need for an easy-to-learn platform that provides a smooth integration between soft- and hardware and offers possibilities for wireless networking. In this paper we discuss existing development platforms that are used by designers and identify qualities that are important for the design of intelligent environments. We then present the Lithne platform, consisting of nodes that are user programmable and software packages that facilitate wireless networking. One of the core qualities of the Lithne platform is the possibility to wirelessly program the nodes, allowing designers to develop intelligent environments iteratively in the actual context. Finally, we present cases in which Lithne has been used in the design and implementation of intelligent lighting environments.

Evaluating player experience for children's outdoor pervasive games

There is a growing body of research in pervasive outdoor gaming, mainly focused on adult players playing games on smart phones. Published evaluations of the player experience in such games are largely based on anecdotal descriptions and post-play surveys. The latter approach is especially challenging to apply when the play test participants are children. Observations of game play so far have been ad hoc relying on unstructured observation, which makes it difficult to extract reliable conclusions from observations and to draw comparisons between different games. In this paper we present two methods developed specifically for evaluating the player experience in children’s outdoor games: the Outdoor Play Observation Scheme (OPOS) and GroupSorter. We discuss their application in three different case studies and conclude that OPOS is useful in quantifying the different types of play behavior in outdoor games; GroupSorter adds qualitative data on the play experience. Moreover, the application of GroupSorter is not limited to game development but can be used for obtaining user input in other context as well.