Steve Hinske

Towards guidelines for designing augmented toy environments

Combining interactive technology with traditional toys promises to significantly enhance the educational value of childrens play. Designing such augmented toy environments, however, requires designers to take both the traditional, technology-less nature of the toy, and the novel interactive aspects of the newly accessible virtual environment into account. This article attempts to present a unified set of guidelines for the design and implementation of augmented toy environments, drawing upon existing literature in traditional and educational toy and game design, as well as our own experiences in building mixed reality game environments. We also offer practical advice on the use of these guidelines by reporting on our own augmented toy environment for young children, called the Augmented Knights Castle, which encourages learning about the Middle Ages in a playful way.

W41K: digitally augmenting traditional game environments

Augmented game environments use unobtrusively embedded technology to augment traditional games with virtual information and novel interaction capabilities. This article establishes and discusses a set of guidelines for designing and implementing such environments, based on our experiences in creating digital augmentations of existing play environments. We suggest a two-step process comprised of game flow virtualization and physical artifact augmentation to create augmented game environments based on existing table top games. We will then demonstrate how these guidelines can be put to practice by presenting the augmented version of a miniature war game.

Determining the Position and Orientation of Multi-Tagged Objects Using RFID Technology

The idea of smart shelves or tables equipped with RFID technology has been around for some time now. A number of commercial products are already available, especially for retailing. All presented solutions, however, are designed to only identify objects currently in range. While this may be sufficient for some applications, there are others that do not only require identification, but furthermore the exact position and orientation of the objects. In this paper, we present an approach to determine the position and orientation of multi-tagged objects. We introduce the general idea, describe our developed system, and present preliminary findings. We also summarize our next steps and describe a planned evaluation

An augmented toy and social interaction in children with autism

An Augmented Knight’s Castle (AKC) play set was adapted so that children with autism can configure programmable elements. This is compared with a non-configurable AKC. When the system is configurable, and when it is switched on, less solitary play and more cooperative play occur. Digital toys and their configurability are key factors in design for children with autism, allowing greater individual control and more socially oriented behaviour. We suggest that tangibles provide a safety net for encouraging social interaction as they allow for a broad range of interaction styles.

Intelligent privacy support for large public displays

This paper presents a novel concept for personalized privacy support on large public displays. In a first step, a formative evaluation was conducted in order to analyze the requirements of potential users regarding the protection of private information on large public displays. The insights gained in this evaluation were used to design a system, which automatically adapts the information visible on public displays according to the current social situation and the individual privacy preferences of the user working on the display. The developed system was evaluated regarding its appropriateness for daily usage and its usefulness to protect privacy.

In my own words: configuration of tangibles, object interaction and children with autism

An Augmented Knights Castle (AKC) play set was adapted so that children with autism can configure programmable elements. This is compared with a non-configurable AKC. When the system is configurable, less solitary play and more cooperative play occurred. Configurability is a key factor in design for children with autism allowing greater individual control and more socially oriented behaviour. We suggest that tangibles provide a safety net for encouraging social interaction as they allow for a broad range of interaction styles.

Using a Movable RFID Antenna to Automatically Determine the Position and Orientation of Objects on a Tabletop

Augmented tabletop games support players by sensing the context of game figures (i.e., position and/or orientation) and then using this information to display additional game information, or to perform game related calculations. In our work we try to detect the position and orientation of game figures using small, unobtrusive passive RFID tags. In order to localize our multi-tagged objects, we use a small movable antenna mounted underneath the table to scan the game environment. While this approach is not capable of real-time positioning, it achieves a very high accuracy on the order of a few millimeters. This article describes our experimental setup, discusses the trade-off between speed and accuracy, and contrasts our approach with a multi-antenna setup.

Let the play set come alive: Supporting playful learning through the digital augmentation of a traditional toy environment

The Augmented Knights Castle (AKC) comprises traditional play figures and scenery embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to enhance user experience by triggering various forms of audio output. In this paper we present the results of a user study with over 100 children to evaluate the AKC in terms of playful learning, compared with an identical, non-augmented version. Findings suggest that children who played with the AKC remembered facts about the Middle Ages that were presented to them in the form of verbal commentaries, both immediately after the play session as well as in a post-test two months later.

An infrastructure for interactive and playful learning in augmented toy environments

In this paper we describe our approach to realize a pervasive (computing) learning environment for children based on augmented toys: traditional toys that are equipped with pervasive computing technologies and can thus be linked with virtual information such as educational content. We report on our experiences building and deploying the Augmented Knights Castle, an augmented toy environment that allows for learning about the Middle Ages in a playful way. We demonstrate and discuss how educational content is provided in such an environment and describe the design of the underlying infrastructure.

Pulling digital data from a smart object: implementing the pullme-paradigm with a mobile phone

This paper presents the PullMe paradigm, an interaction technique for easily initializing and confirming the transmission of digital data using a mobile phone. The main idea and benefit is the substitution of less feasible techniques such as manually selecting or confirming a service (e.g., by entering a password) with a simple hand gesture. We describe a prototypical implementation that utilizes an acceleration sensor and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology integrated into a mobile phone. The transmission of data is realized using Bluetooth. We furthermore discuss how near-field communication (NFC) is likely to enable interaction patterns like the PullMe paradigm in the near future.