Stefan Greuter

Towards personalised, gamified systems: an investigation into game design, personality and player typologies

With the rise of Gamification, the boundaries between play and games on the one hand, and everyday life on the other are being challenged, and as a result game play is entering the realm of everyday life. We believe that with the breakdown of this dichotomy and with the increasing presence of game elements in everyday life in the form of Gamification, there are more factors such as users intrinsic motivation, agenda, learning preferences and personality that should be considered in the design of gamified systems. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between player types, and personality types and traits. By way of investigating pre-existing player type models as well as personality traits and types models, we have identified possible relationships between these two areas of research, and in that, between the realm of games, and the realm of the everyday. As a result, we propose a table identifying these possible relationships between player types, personality types and traits, and game elements and game mechanics and discuss how this connection may impact the design of gamified systems and offer insight towards more user orientated design objectives.

SpaceWalk: Movement and Interaction in Virtual Space with Commodity Hardware

We introduce SpaceWalk, an experimental approach to allow a person to move around a small room while wearing a Head Mounted Display. The goal is to get immersed users in everyday settings out of their seats and naturally experiencing movement within the simulation. SpaceWalk integrates a wireless solution around commodity equipment and requires no calibration by the user. This allows a low encumbrance full-body immersion in virtual reality while walking around living-room sized real-world spaces. The platform combines a commodity Head Mounted Display (Oculus Rift), with a depth-based camera (Kinect2) capturing movement of body and limbs within the space. A tablet computer, carried in a backpack, runs commodity VR software (Unity) with our own extensions that integrate the components. A brief survey of the literature demonstrates a gap in that other systems do neither allow a persons body to be routinely tracked without calibration, or movement around the space without the encumbrance of wires. The proposed full body immersive virtual reality platform opens the door to Virtual Reality in small environments, such as peoples homes, that is compelling, easy to setup and use. After half a century, VR is coming of age, yet routine and unencumbered movement still needs to be achieved. This paper offers a method for doing so. Its contribution is to make Virtual Reality accessible to a wider group of users who do not have access to a professional virtual reality facility. In doing so it may help to unlock new paradigms for work, learning and entertainment.

A context-based design process for future use cases of autonomous driving: prototyping AutoGym

Autonomous cars are on the horizon, meaning passengers will no longer have to focus on driving leaving them with extra time for other activities, or engagements. However, research has focused primarily on safety related aspects of autonomous driving, overlooking the need to design for this new free time. This raises the question, how do we design new interactive experiences for the future of autonomous cars? In this paper, we present a design process derived from our research-through-design approach to explore possible everyday use cases of autonomous driving from an experience-focused perspective. We report details of the four methods that constituted, and influenced our design process and led to the creation of AutoGym, an exertion interface with context-based interactions suitable for future car-based commuting. The contribution is twofold: Foremost, our design process suggests guidelines on how to design and simulate future use cases of what we assume will constitute the autonomous driving experience. Secondly, we aim to inspire automotive user experience designers to pursue a context-based design approach by leveraging situational features which support experiences that are tailored and unique to autonomous driving.

Controlling viewpoint from markerless head tracking in an immersive ball game using a commodity depth-based camera

We present the use of commodity depth-based cameras to control viewpoint from passive unencumbered head tracking. This allowed participants to maintain correct perspective while playing an immersive computer ball game, without the need to wear devices, wires or markers. Viewpoint update drives parallax that supports orientation, the judging of distance and scale, moving in response to the simulation and the feeling of presence. Its incorporation increases the validity of using simulations in applications in which any of these are important. Although updating viewpoint from a depth camera has been demonstrated, it has not undergone accurate measures of latency, task performance or user experience. A randomised within subjects trial of n=12 participants was used to determine if head and hand tracking from depth-based cameras helped the playability and experience of a multi-player ball game. Findings suggest that experience is only improved when both ball interaction and viewpoint are controlled through natural movements and that the quality of viewpoint update from a depth-based camera was sufficient to allow a ball game to be played without inducing disorientation or nausea. This work demonstrates both a potential benefit and risk of using depth-based cameras to update viewpoint.

Designing a game for occupational health and safety in the construction industry

Safety in the construction industry is important because people continue to be injured on construction sites. To address this, the Australian construction industry and its regulator, the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, have required that anyone who intends to work on a construction site must complete an Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) construction induction process. One quite complex section of the construction induction training deals with the identification of hazards and the management of hazards through controls to prevent workers from injury. There is a multitude of worksite hazards and many OH&S controls. A key challenge for OH&S training is to engage learners. Serious Games are a promising vehicle to engage learners and enhance their retention of important concepts. This paper reports on the design decisions and the development of an informative and entertaining game, which is intended to motivate users to learn about workplace hazards. The game is also intended to help users retain their knowledge of workplace hazards and their management, and to assist with knowledge transfer into the real world.

Contextual Inquiry of Future Commuting in Autonomous Cars

Millions of people consider their car-based commuting a daily hassle. Autonomous car technology promises a relief from driving related stress and may change the commuting experience fundamentally. So far, research in this field has mainly been focused on commuting in manually driven cars or on usability and safety issues of specific driver automation technologies. In order to explore how to design activities and entertainment for future commuting in fully autonomous cars, we conducted a contextual inquiry inspired field study with three car-based commuters in an improvised autonomous car. This paper introduces our research setup and presents preliminary findings. It contributes to the exploration of the design space of autonomous driving in two ways: (1) the paper describes a pragmatic approach to adapt a contextual inquiry for the exploration of future use cases of autonomous driving and (2) it also articulates design implications and temporal frames derived from our first set of user studies that we regard as essential for designing context-sensitive entertainment in future cars.

Gamicards - An Alternative Method for Paper-Prototyping the Design of Gamified Systems

This paper introduces an early prototype concept known as Gamicards, for use in the design of gamified systems.With the popularity of gamified approaches and the varying knowledge of designers of these systems, not enough resources exist that can assist to guide designers through the process, ensuring important elements (such as motivation) are considered. Gamicards are an early prototype deck of cards that are designed to provide a resource for designers from a range of different backgrounds and knowledge of gamified design, with the intention to develop more meaningful gamified approaches.

Controlling Viewpoint from Markerless Head Tracking in an Immersive Ball Game Using a Commodity Depth Based Camera

We present the use of commodity depth based cameras to control viewpoint from passive unencumbered head tracking. This allowed participants to maintain correct perspective while playing an immersive computer ball game, without the need to wear devices, wires or markers. While viewpoint update is more generally useful than stereoscopy it has traditionally used tracking equipment of expense and complexity unsuitable for home use. The current explosion of depth based cameras into the home game market could provide a cheaper, simpler and more elegant solution. While updating viewpoint from a depth camera has been demonstrated it has not previously been studied in a multi-player or fast moving game or undergone accurate measures of latency, task performance or user experience. We integrated low cost commodity hardware including depth based cameras, computers, projectors and stereo glasses, computer games software, a laptop and large projection surfaces. System latency and user performance and experience were measured across a number of viewpoint conditions. System latency of the viewpoint and hand tracking were measured by analysing high speed video footage. The number of goals scored and saved gave a measure of task performance. Subjective impressions of experience were taken from questionnaire and post interview.

AutoPlay: Unfolding Motivational Affordances of Autonomous Driving

The AutoPlay prototypes have been designed to explore the implementation of non-driving activities into the context of a future autonomous driving situation. The conceptual design goal was to maintain a pleasurable situational awareness of the inactive driver by integrating the driving context as a meaningful input into the interaction system. In this chapter, we introduce the design of three experimental applications for autonomous driving and report on explorative user studies conducted to investigate the impact of the three AutoPlay prototypes: AutoGym, an in-car exertion game that translates car speed and traffic situations into an individual exercise program. AutoJam, a touch sensitive steering wheel cover to generate interactive music experiences in a creative interplay with car’s driving dynamics. AutoRoute, a discovery application for future urban commuting in autonomous cars that enables an exploration of the city based on spontaneous routing and rerouting. Furthermore, we reflect on the outcome of the user studies and propose three motivational affordances of autonomous driving: drivability, performability, and explorability. Each of these concepts, help to understand the motivational possibilities of the autonomous driving situation and facilitates a meaningful alignment of interaction systems and the driving context. We discuss the underlying concepts of the three affordances by relating them to the experiences identified in the user studies. Subsequently the contribution of this chapter is twofold: (1) We introduce the AutoPlay prototypes as inspirational concepts for aligning non-driving activities with the autonomous driving context and (2) we propose three motivational affordances as design targets for the implementation of non-driving activities in order to initiate a broader discussion on the pleasures of autonomous driving beyond instrumental motives.

The Virtual Experiences Portals — A Reconfigurable Platform for Immersive Visualization

Virtual Experience Portals are mobile stereoscopic ultra high definition LCD displays with human interface sensors, which can be combined into a reconfigurable development platform for shared immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences. We are targeting applications in, for example, industrial automation, serious games, scientific visualization and building architecture. The aim is to provide a framework for natural and effortless interfaces for shared small group experiences of interactive 3D content, combining selected existing elements of computer aided virtual environments and virtual reality. In this short paper we report on efforts to date in developing the platform, integration with an existing visualization framework, SAGE2, some short application case studies, one in an industry-sponsored research context in industrial automation, and some ideas for future work.