Analyzing the Impact of Spatio-Temporal Sensor Resolution on Player Experience in Augmented Reality Games

Along with automating everyday tasks of human life, smartphones have become one of the most popular devices to play video games on due to their interactivity. Smartphones are embedded with various sensors which enhance their ability to adopt new new interaction techniques for video games. These integrated sen- sors, such as motion sensors or location sensors, make the device able to adopt new interaction techniques that enhance usability. However, despite their mobility and embedded sensor capacity, smartphones are limited in processing power and display area compared to desktop computer consoles. When it comes to evaluat- ing Player Experience (PX), players might not have as compelling an experience because the rich graphics environments that a desktop computer can provide are absent on a smartphone. A plausible alternative in this regard can be substituting the virtual game world with a real world game board, perceived through the device camera by rendering the digital artifacts over the camera view. This technology is widely known as Augmented Reality (AR). Smartphone sensors (e.g. GPS, accelerometer, gyro-meter, compass) have enhanced the capability for deploying Augmented Reality technology. AR has been applied to a large number of smartphone games including shooters, casual games, or puzzles. Because AR play environments are viewed through the camera, rendering the digital artifacts consistently and accurately is crucial because the digital characters need to move with respect to sensed orientation, then the accelerometer and gyroscope need to provide su ciently accurate and precise readings to make the game playable. In particular, determining the pose of the camera in space is vital as the appropriate angle to view the rendered digital characters are determined by the pose of the camera. This defines how well the players will be able interact with the digital game characters. Depending in the Quality of Service (QoS) of these sensors, the Player Experience (PX) may vary as the rendering of digital characters are affected by noisy sensors causing a loss of registration. Confronting such problem while developing AR games is di cult in general as it requires creating wide variety of game types, narratives, input modalities as well as user-testing. Moreover, current AR games developers do not have any specific guidelines for developing AR games, and concrete guidelines outlining the tradeoffs between QoS and PX for different genres and interaction techniques are required. My dissertation provides a complete view (a taxonomy) of the spatio-temporal sensor resolution depen- dency of the existing AR games. Four user experiments have been conducted and one experiment is proposed to validate the taxonomy and demonstrate the differential impact of sensor noise on gameplay of different genres of AR games in different aspect of PX. This analysis is performed in the context of a novel instru- mentation technology, which allows the controlled manipulation of QoS on position and orientation sensors. The experimental outcome demonstrated how the QoS of input sensor noise impacts the PX differently while playing AR game of different genre and the key elements creating this differential impact are - the input modality, narrative and game mechanics. Later, concrete guidelines are derived to regulate the sensor QoS as complete set of instructions to develop different genres or AR games

Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

Robo-ethics design approach for cultural heritage: Case study - Robotics for museum purpose

The thesis shows the study behind the design process and the realization of the robotic solution for museum purposes called Virgil. The research started with the literature review on museums management and the critic analysis of signi cant digital experiences in the museum eld. Then, it continues analyzing the museum and its relation with the territory and the cultural heritage. From this preliminary analysis stage, signi cant issue related to museum management analysis comes out: nowadays many museum areas are not accessible to visitors because of issues related to security or architectural barriers. Make explorable these areas is one of the important topics in the cultural debate related to the visiting experience. This rst stage gave the knowledge to develop the outlines which brought to the realization of an ef cient service design then realized following robot ethical design values. One of the pillars of the robot ethical design is the necessity to involve all the stakeholders in the early project phases, for this reason, the second stage of the research was the study of the empathic relations between museum and visitors. In this phase, facilitator factors of this relation are de ned and transformed into guidelines for the product system performances. To perform this stage, it has been necessary create a relation between all the stakeholders of the project, which are: Politecnico di Torino, Tim (Telecom Italia Mobile) JOL CRAB research laboratory and Terre dei Savoia which is the association in charge of the Racconiggi’s Castle, the context scenario of the research. The third stage of the research, provided the realization of a prototype of the robot, in this stage telepresence robot piloted the Museum Guide it is used to show, in real time, the inaccessible areas of the museum enriched with multimedia contents. This stage concludes with the nal test user, from the test session feedback analysis, many of people want to drive themselves the robot. To give an answer to user feedback an interactive game has been developed. The game is based both on the robot ability to be driven by the visitors and also on the capacity of the robot to be used as a platform for the digital telling. To be effective, the whole experience it has been designed and tested with the support of high school students, which are one of the categories less interested in the traditional museum visit. This experience wants to demonstrate that the conscious and ethical use of the robotic device is effectively competitive, in term of performances, with the other solutions of digital visit: because it allows a more interactive digital experience in addition to the satisfaction of the physical visit at the museum

Exploring asymmetric roles in mixed-ability gaming

Tese de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020Noticeably, the majority of mainstreamgames — digitalgames and tabletopgames — are still designed for players with a standard set of abilities. As such, people with someformof disability, oftenface insurmountable challengestoplay mainstreamgames or are limited to playgames specifcally designed for them. By conducting an initial study, we share multiplayer gaming experiences of people with visual impairments collected from interviews with 10 adults and 10 minors, and 140 responses to an online survey. We include the perspectives of 17 sighted people who play with someone who has a visual impairment, collected in a second online survey. We found that people with visual impairments are playingdiversegames,butface limitationsin playing with others who have different visual abilities. What stood out is the lack of intersection ingaming opportunities, and consequently, in habits and interests of people with different visual abilities. In this study, we highlight barriers associated with these experiences beyond inaccessibility issues and discuss implications and opportunities for the design of mixed-abilitygaming.Asexpected,we foundaworrying absenceofgames that caterto different abilities. In this context, we explored ability-based asymmetric roles as a design approach to create engaging and challenging mixed-ability play. We designed and developed two collaborative testbedgamesexploring asymmetric interdependent roles. In a remote study with 13 mixed-visual-ability pairs we assessed how roles affected perceptions of engagement, competence, and autonomy, using a mixed-methods approach. The games provided an engaging and challenging experience, in which differences in visual ability were not limiting. Our results underline how experiences unequal by design can give rise to an equitable joint experience

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies : Year 2020 : Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage

The announcement of the creation of a European Year of Cultural Heritage (year 2018) – by the Decision 2017/864 of the European Parliament – encouraged the creation, in 2017, of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage (ESACH). ESACH has become the first still-growing interdisciplinary and cross- -generational network in the field. Currently brings together young researchers and researchers at early stages of their careers, in the fields of culture and heritage, from all kinds of academic disciplines and is made up of members from various European universities and research centres (see www.esach.org). Within the network, the main questions are: How do we engage with the past elements of our culture(s)? How and why do we protect culture as a genuine element of a contemporary cultural system? What do younger generations state as heritage and what ways do they see to safeguard and experience it? ESACH stands up for a participatory way of involvement and is eager to take part in the cultural discourse at European and national levels. Since ESACHS’ foundation, the Portuguese publisher Mazu Press (www.mazupress.com) has been associated with the initiatives of the Portuguese branch of ESACH based in Lisbon (Sharing Heritage Lisbon), firstly with the promotion actions and then with the publication of the book “New Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Cultural Heritage Studies. Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage in the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018”. In this atypical Covid-19 pandemic year, Mazu Press again invited ESACH to join the renewed idea of “unifying through Cultural Heritage”, creating the opportunity for all to associate their efforts to this volume of “Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies, Year 2020”. Until now, ESACH members have been given the opportunity to contribute their ideas in several European events organized by the respective stakeholders, such as the Genoa Meeting, in October 2019, which had the cultural, logistic and financial support of the University of Genoa and foremost the PhD Course in Study and Enhancement of the Historical, Artistic-Architectural and Environmental Heritage. This book brings together twenty chapters by twenty four authors from Canada, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey. This sharing of knowledge, culture and heritage studies, through various disciplines, shows the richness – advances and new perspectives – generated by the common passion for cultural heritage.Mazutech R&D; Università di Genova / Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche / Dottorato in Studio e Valorizzazione del Patrimonio Storico, Artistico-Architettonico e Ambientaleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio