Supporting mobile mixed-reality experiences

Mobile mixed-reality experiences mix physical and digital spaces, enabling participants to simultaneously inhabit a shared environment online and on the streets. These experiences take the form of games, educational applications and new forms of performance and art, and engender new opportunities for interaction, collaboration and play. As mobile mixed-reality experiences move out of the laboratory and into more public settings they raise new challenges concerning how to support these experiences in the wild. This thesis argues that mobile mixed-reality experiences in which artists retain creative control over the content and operation of each experience, particularly those that are deployed as theatrical performances, require dedicated support for content authoring and reactive orchestration tools and paradigms in order to be successfully and robustly operated in public settings. These requirements are examined in detail, drawing on the experience of supporting four publicly toured mobile mixed-reality experiences; Can You See Me Now?, Uncle Roy All Around You, I Like Frank in Adelaide and Savannah, which have provided a platform to practically develop, refine and evaluate new solutions to answer these challenges in the face of presenting the experiences to many thousands of participants over a four year period. This thesis presents two significant supporting frameworks. The ColourMaps system enables designers to author location-based content by directly colouring over maps; providing a simple, familiar and yet highly flexible approach to matching location-triggers to complex physical spaces. It provides support for multiple and specialised content layers, and the ability to configure and manage other aspects of an experience, including filtering inaccurate position data and underpinning orchestration tools. Second, the Orchestration framework supports the day-to-day operation of public experiences; providing dedicated control-room tools for monitoring that reveal the content landscape and historical events, intervention and improvisation techniques for steering and shaping each participant's experience as it unfolds both physically and virtually, and processes to manage a constant flow of participants

Supporting mobile mixed-reality experiences

Mobile mixed-reality experiences mix physical and digital spaces, enabling participants to simultaneously inhabit a shared environment online and on the streets. These experiences take the form of games, educational applications and new forms of performance and art, and engender new opportunities for interaction, collaboration and play. As mobile mixed-reality experiences move out of the laboratory and into more public settings they raise new challenges concerning how to support these experiences in the wild. This thesis argues that mobile mixed-reality experiences in which artists retain creative control over the content and operation of each experience, particularly those that are deployed as theatrical performances, require dedicated support for content authoring and reactive orchestration tools and paradigms in order to be successfully and robustly operated in public settings. These requirements are examined in detail, drawing on the experience of supporting four publicly toured mobile mixed-reality experiences; Can You See Me Now?, Uncle Roy All Around You, I Like Frank in Adelaide and Savannah, which have provided a platform to practically develop, refine and evaluate new solutions to answer these challenges in the face of presenting the experiences to many thousands of participants over a four year period. This thesis presents two significant supporting frameworks. The ColourMaps system enables designers to author location-based content by directly colouring over maps; providing a simple, familiar and yet highly flexible approach to matching location-triggers to complex physical spaces. It provides support for multiple and specialised content layers, and the ability to configure and manage other aspects of an experience, including filtering inaccurate position data and underpinning orchestration tools. Second, the Orchestration framework supports the day-to-day operation of public experiences; providing dedicated control-room tools for monitoring that reveal the content landscape and historical events, intervention and improvisation techniques for steering and shaping each participant's experience as it unfolds both physically and virtually, and processes to manage a constant flow of participants

Empowering Mobile Art Practice : A Recontextualization of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

Creating art with mobile phones in public spaces is an emerging form of artistic expression. This dissertation investigates the design and use of mobile art applications for creating and sharing interactive art experiences in public spaces. It explores new ways of deploying mobile and ubiquitous computing for art making that fosters creativity and community. This is done by developing a series of novel prototype applications, with a focus on multimodal interfaces that are put into use in authentic environments for validation by real people. The approach is to couple an artistically motivated design and innovation process with mobile, web and public display technologies, in order to explore the prototypes that build the empirical framework of this research. Multimodal interfaces address many of the human senses, such as seeing, hearing, touching; they thus provide powerful user experiences. Combining spaces with different modalities provides new possibilities for real-time interaction and engaging experiences. But there is a problem in that little is known about how to design multimodal interfaces and systems to work in the context of the city as digital interface, especially how to enable participatory, real-time interaction in urban space to foster creativity and togetherness. The resulting mobile art applications signal a new era in digital creativity, as they show the strengths of future mobile interactive platforms. The key points are providing engaging experiences of mass participation both locally and physically distributed; enabling creativity; and promoting real-time interaction not only between ‘people and people’ or ‘people and machines’ but also between ‘people and things’, such as nature, buildings, objects and the physical environment generally. These forthcoming approaches will lead to designs and implementations of new mobile interaction platforms, which eventually will lead us to new leisure time activities, such as creating and sharing art experiences in public space, but also to new ways of living an art- and culture-inspired lifestyle - empowering mobile art practice

Learning Design in Hybrid Spaces: Challenges for Teachers and Learners

The issue of how to design and implement novel learning spaces that work across physical and virtual domains simultaneously is the concern of this thesis. It investigates the conceptualisation of hybrid learning spaces; the iterative development of a learning design process for teachers; and the nature of learner and teacher practice, including their roles and activities in implementing this new form of learning space. The thesis explores the challenges that teachers face in embedding novel learning designs and interventions in their practice, and the related challenges that learners face in engaging in the new forms of learning interactions that result from these novel interventions. The thesis emphasises the evolving roles and activities of the learners, how these roles and activities inform each other, and how they relate to the learning design. The changing nature of teacher design and implementation practice, including their use of the learning design framework is assessed. The thesis is comprised of two separate empirical studies, each with a distinct design and implementation aspect, and with two different populations. In the first study, the learning design process is developed by the researcher and then implemented with a group of young learners in a hybrid learning space. In the second study, a learning design process is iteratively developed by a group of teachers, and is then implemented in the hybrid space with a group of PGCE students. The thesis contributes to the literature on learning spaces, by establishing both a conceptualisation of a hybrid learning space, and a learning design process to support teachers. It contributes to the CSCL literature by examining how learners and teachers develop highly specific roles and activities to support collaboration, whilst exploring how these inform novel learning practices in the hybrid space. The thesis challenges the dominant position of scripts in the CSCL literature by arguing that support for particular interactions, closely aligned with the affordances of the hybrid space, is more effective at supporting collaboration than the outside imposition of specific roles. The thesis is grounded in a socio-constructivist epistemology, a theoretical perspective on mixed physical-digital spaces, and a methodology derived from Interaction Analysis