Teresa Romão

InStory: a system for mobile information access, storytelling and gaming activities in physical spaces

This paper describes the work carried out in the InStory project. InStory has the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile storytelling, information access, and gaming activities. The platform has a flexible computational architecture that integrates heterogeneous devices, different media formats and computational support for different narrative modes and gaming activities. The system is driven and validated by a set of story threads and narratives that are centered on the exploration of physical spaces. This exploration is combined with the perspective of sharing information between users and providing historic context. The project also wants to explore the social aspect of shared narratives and activities, with the idea that the technology can provide new innovative approaches to social participation in different types of events.

Advances in Computer Entertainment.

These are the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment ACE 2012). ACE has become the leading scientific forum for dissemination of cutting-edge research results in the area of entertainment computing. Interactive entertainment is one of the most vibrant areas of interest in modern society and is amongst the fastest growing industries in the world. ACE 2012 will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present their innovative work and discuss all aspects and challenges of interactive entertainment technology, in an exciting, cultural, and stimulating environment. ACE is by nature a multidisciplinary conference, therefore attracting people from across a wide spectrum of interests and disciplines including computer science, design, arts, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and marketing. The main goal of ACE is to stimulate discussion in the development of new and compelling entertainment computing and interactive art concepts and applications. At ACE conferences participants are encouraged to present work they believe will shape the future, going beyond the established paradigms, and focusing on all areas related to interactive entertainment. This is the 9th ACE conference, and the first time that such an entertainment computing conference is being held in the emerging world. The theme of ACE 2012 is “Entertaining the Whole World”. Kathmandu in Nepal (“The Roof of the World”) has been chosen as venue. In line with the theme ACE 2012 will emphasize the use of easily available technology. Technology for entertainment design is becoming cheap or even extremely cheap. Designing interactive entertainment with commercial off-the-shelf technology (cheap sensors, Kinect, Arduino, etc.) is becoming regular business. How can we use this development to invent yet more new ways of harnessing the entertainment power of creating? Can we convert consumers of entertainment into creators of entertainment, where the process of creating is maybe as important as the resulting product? Young people in emerging markets can become creators as well as consumers of digital entertainment. They can distribute their work through apps and the internet, and through media creativity benefit their country and economy. We wish to strike up discussions and initiate projects which will benefit the emerging world through digital entertainment.

InAuthoring environment: interfaces for creating spatial stories and gaming activities

This paper focuses on the design and development of an authoring environment for the InStory project. InStory is a platform for mobile storytelling, gaming activities and information access. It focuses on the exploration of cultural and historical physical spaces, promoting interaction between users. During those explorations, users have access to contextual geo-referenced multimedia data, through the use of mobile devices, such as PDAs or mobile phones, either for knowledge acquisition regarding the surrounding environment and its cultural and historical aspects or for engaging in story/gaming activities together with other users.The authoring environment for such story/gaming activities and media content, allows users to create and personalize their own stories. It comprises two frameworks -- InAuthor, a graphical story/game editor, and InContent, a visual editor for creating screen areas through the placing of multimedia and interface elements and their export to InAuthor, in order to be associated with activity nodes.

Augmenting reality with geo-referenced information for environmental management

When interacting with natural or urban environments there are many situations where the ability to access data in real time becomes relevant. Augmented Reality (AR) technologies allow real time superimposition of synthetic objects on real images, providing an augmented knowledge about the surrounding world. Using a Head Mounted Display, the user of an AR system can visualize the exterior world with additional virtual information that is generated in real time and in a contextual way.This paper presents ANTS (Augmented Environments), an AR project for providing geo-referenced environmental information. The project uses a flexible client-server approach that allows to move more or less components to the client, depending on processing power and application requirements. The geo-referenced database and 3D model for user positioning are located in the server and the presentation component, for image composition and display, is the most fundamental part of the client. The applications for environmental management, include monitoring water quality using models of the pollutant transport, the visualization of the temporal evolution of physical structures and the evolution of subsoil structures, such as phone and power supply networks.

A location-based multiplayer mobile game to encourage pro-environmental behaviours

This paper explores the use of persuasive technology concepts to induce behaviour changes towards a better environmental consciousness, through mobile phones and public displays. More specifically, the paper reports the design, development and evaluation of Gaea, a location-based multiplayer mobile game, which prompts people to recycle virtual objects within a specified spatial context. Initial user tests were conducted to evaluate Gaeas persuasive ability during a small-scale event. Later on, Gaeas usability, and primarily its gameplay, were evaluated more extensively, in the context of an open day event at our University campus attended by 7000 high school students. The results obtained from the user tests were very positive, and may give a considerable contribution to the future development of persuasive applications, regardless the area of study.

CAAT: a discrete approach to emotion assessment

In this work we present a new way of assessing affective states through direct selection of emotion words from a discrete set. The proposed tool, the Circumplex Affect Assessment Tool (CAAT), is built upon Robert Plutchiks circumplex model of emotions and, as far as our preliminary tests have shown, is a pleasant and reliable way to assess users affective states, with significant correlations with Self Assessment Manikin ratings.

LEY!: persuasive pervasive gaming on domestic energy consumption-awareness

Nowadays, energy consumption (and wastage) is particularly a major issue in our society. It has been a challenge to find ways of educating people to follow better attitudes towards energy savings. This paper proposes a pervasive-based serious game approach to help people understand household energy usage and to persuade them to change negative energy consumption habits. The mechanics of the game are based on real-time domestic energy consumption information, presenting a collaborative-competitive approach.

Testing the usability of a platform for rapid development of mobile context-aware applications

In this paper, we present the usability evaluation of IVO (Integrated Virtual Operator), a platform that supports the rapid development of contextaware applications by users with no programming skills. Using only the tools provided by the platform (IVO Builder and IVO Outlook), users can define temporal and spatial conditions and associate them with workflows of activities available within the platform. This way, whenever the defined conditions occur, the users smartphone will immediately produce the intended behavior, with no need for user intervention. The applications developed using IVO can easily be made available to other users through a distributed web platform. Moreover, an android client was developed, to run the IVO-developed applications, allowing the smartphone to act as the ubiquitous interaction device. The evaluation of the platform was performed through usability tests at both the end-user level (android client) and the developer-user level (builder tools).

If you can feel it, you can share it!: a system for sharing emotions during live sports broadcasts

The exchange of opinions through chat-based services or social networks while watching TV shows has become a common practice. However, the use of these platforms requires users to shift their attention from the TV to whatever device they are accessing them with. This may be a problem in the case of live sports broadcasts, since it can cause users/viewers to miss important events. Addressing this issue, we introduce WeFeel, a system that enhances the experience of remote spectators of broadcasted sports events, by allowing them to share their opinions and emotions with friends through the TV screen using a mobile device. Results from user tests were highly positive, with participants manifesting great interest in using WeFeel.

Enhancing remote live sports experiences through an eyes-free interaction

When using mobile screen apps on touch-based mobile devices to interact with live sports TV broadcasts, people need to keep an eye on those devices, since they do not provide tactile feedback. If the app on the mobile screen requires user interaction when something exciting is about to happen on the TV screen, the user needs to shift attention from the TV to the mobile screen, spoiling the whole experience. This paper presents WeBet, a mobile game that prompts users to bet if a goal is about to happen during a football match, without requiring their visual attention. WeBet aims to study if this concept conveys an exciting user experience by allowing a natural interaction with the mobile screen without looking at it. Results from a preliminary user test helped to validate our approach and identified important refinements for future work.