Unmediated Interaction: Communicating with Computers and Embedded Devices as If They Are Not There

Although computers are smaller and more readily accessible today than they have ever been, I believe that we have barely scratched the surface of what computers can become. When we use computing devices today, we end up spending a lot of our time navigating to particular functions or commands to use devices their way rather than executing those commands immediately. In this dissertation, I explore what I call unmediated interaction, the notion of people using computers as if the computers are not there and as if the people are using their own abilities or powers instead. I argue that facilitating unmediated interaction via personalization, new input modalities, and improved text entry can reduce both input overhead and output overhead, which are the burden of providing inputs to and receiving outputs from the intermediate device, respectively. I introduce three computational methods for reducing input overhead and one for reducing output overhead. First, I show how input data mining can eliminate the need for user inputs altogether. Specifically, I develop a method for mining controller inputs to gain deep insights about a players playing style, their preferences, and the nature of video games that they are playing, all of which can be used to personalize their experience without any explicit input on their part. Next, I introduce gaze locking, a method for sensing eye contact from an image that allows people to interact with computers, devices, and other objects just by looking at them. Third, I introduce computationally optimized keyboard designs for touchscreen manual input that allow people to type on smartphones faster and with far fewer errors than currently possible. Last, I introduce the racing auditory display (RAD), an audio system that makes it possible for people who are blind to play the same types of racing games that sighted players can play, and with a similar speed and sense of control as sighted players. The RAD shows how we can reduce output overhead to provide user interface parity between people with and without disabilities. Together, I hope that these systems open the door to even more efforts in unmediated interaction, with the goal of making computers less like devices that we use and more like abilities or powers that we have

Game Design For an Environmental-themed 2D Adventure Mobile Game

Game is a game based on technology media, which is currently one of the entertainments today. The development of games has become a technology that can be felt, through computers to cellphones. One of the game media, namely mobile games, is an attraction for gamers (people who play games) now. Game makers are competing to make games interesting and useful for game lovers. The genres presented are also diverse, such as RPG, Open World, Horror, Puzzle, Sport, and others. At this time the design of the mobile game focuses on the slide type game, where the camera in the game moves right and left, and the illustrations presented are 2D. This game takes the topic of the environment, which through the game tries to invite players to preserve, learn, and understand about the environment, presented with the spices of RPG (Role Playing Game) games as well as a strong story presentatio

“Belago” Simulasi Strategi Perang dan Ekonomi Dalam Media Permainan Papan

In this era, people certainly tend to play digital games, whether on computers, consoles or other gadgets. But no doubt that board games or board games remain the choice of games that entertain a number of circles. Board games that still exist today played by people such as Chess, Monopoly, Uno, Ludo, Snake Ladder, and others are examples of the many board games that can still be enjoyed.According to Boardgame community data on the www.boardgame.id website, the number of board game enthusiasts in 2017-208 is increasing because more and more indie developers are starting to create board games with creative ideas, which attract the attention of board game enthusiasts to try and play with his friends. With this in mind, the design and creation of a board game called "Belago" or fighting in Palembang, which can be enjoyed and played by people, carries the theme of economic-based inter-kingdom warfare. Keywords: Boargame, game, belago, ekonom

The Influence of Social Dependencies on Decision-Making: Initial Investigations with a New Game

This paper describes a new multi-player computer game, Colored Trails (CT), which may be played by people, computers and heterogeneous groups. CT was designed to enable investigation of properties of decision-making strategies in multi-agent situations of varying complexity. The paper presents the results of an initial series of experiments of CT games in which agents' choices affected not only their own outcomes but also the outcomes of other agents. It compares the behavior of people with that of computer agents deploying a variety of decision-making strategies. The results align with behavioral economics studies in showing that people cooperate when they play and that factors of social dependency influence their levels of cooperation. Preliminary results indicate that people design agents to play strategies closer to game-theory predictions, yielding lower utility. Additional experiments show that such agents perform worse than agents designed to make choices that resemble human cooperative behavior. The paper describes challenges raised by these results for designers of agents, especially agents that need to operate in heterogeneous groups that include people.Engineering and Applied Science

AEINS: Interactive Narrative Role in Fostering Character Education

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring young people is a perennial aim of education. Efforts have been done to find other teaching ways other than traditional ones such as games and role play. Narrative-based computer games have found their way as engaging learning platforms that allow collaboration of humans and computers in the creation of innovative experiences. In this paper, we focus on the design of an adaptive, interactive narrative model that makes use of a student model to provide an individualized story-path and an individualized learning process. In other words, we aim to have strong learning objectives underpinned by effective story telling. The adaptive narrative model has been deployed in the educational game environment, AEINS, along with the use of the Socratic Method and pedagogical agents to help teaching in the ethics domain. Evaluation results indicate the usefulness of the design and provide evidence on the development of moral reasoning and the transfer of moral virtues to its users

On The Foundations of Digital Games

Computers have lead to a revolution in the games we play, and, following this, an interest for computer-based games has been sparked in research communities. However, this easily leads to the perception of a one-way direction of influence between that the field of game research and computer science. This historical investigation points towards a deep and intertwined relationship between research on games and the development of computers, giving a richer picture of both fields. While doing so, an overview of early game research is presented and an argument made that the distinction between digital games and non-digital games may be counter-productive to game research as a whole

A Gender specific interactive project to promote bilingual literacy in American Sign Language and written English

What do young adults (age 12-18) think entertainment consists of? Is it movies, television, computer games, video tapes, multi-media products? What about books, are books considered entertainment? Because interactive multi-media can incorporate text, sound, music, animation, Quicktime movies and allows user interaction, books have become a neglected part of the entertainment market. Even though multi-media can be highly interactive, reading books is highly interactive too. The readers must use their imagination to construct the many images, sounds, and moods of the book. There is the concern that people really don\u27t know how to read. A vast majority of these multi-media games are aimed at boys, using the male as the main character of the game. Playing video games at an early age provides an entry to developing computer skills needed in the workforce. Girls have become alienated by not having games aimed at them. Using an active female character in the game instead of passive female roles would be one way to encourage girls to play with computers. Since many games rely on sound or have voice overs, it has excluded the deaf population from computer technology and entertainment as well. The purpose of this project is to create an interactive multi-media game that uses a book as part of the game. To play this game, the player must read the book for clues. This will encourage literacy and the perception of books as a form of entertainment. This project also encourages females to play with computers by using a book (Nancy Drew mystery) targeted at females. A person signing American Sign Language (ASL) will be in the multi-media game to show the translation between ASL and written English. ASL was never translated into written English and has created problems with those who are fluent in ASL but not in English (Van Biema, Time, 4V94, P- 76). Once completed, the game was evaluated by six fifth and sixth graders including three deaf children. This was mostly an oral critique of the project which was administered by the author. The responses were analyzed to determine if there was a generally positive or negative interaction with the format from the testing group. The overall response to the project was positive and they felt it would encourage them to read the book. The hearing children said the project with the ASL videos would stimulate interest in the language. In conclusion, to make an interactive multi-media game that uses a book more exciting other than just questions, the designer must collaborate with a writer which would create a challenge to the writer

Mutually reinforcing systems

Human computation can be described as outsourcing part of a computational process to humans. This technique might be used when a problem can be solved better by humans than computers or it may require a level of adaptation that computers are not yet capable of handling. This can be particularly important in changeable settings which require a greater level of adaptation to the surrounding environment. In most cases, human computation has been used to gather data that computers struggle to create. Games with by-products can provide an incentive for people to carry out such tasks by rewarding them with entertainment. These are games which are designed to create a by-product during the course of regular play. However, such games have traditionally been unable to deal with requests for specific data, relying instead on a broad capture of data in the hope that it will cover specific needs. A new method is needed to focus the efforts of human computation and produce specifically requested results. This would make human computation a more valuable and versatile technique. Mutually reinforcing systems are a new approach to human computation that tries to attain this focus. Ordinary human computation systems tend to work in isolation and do not work directly with each other. Mutually reinforcing systems are an attempt to allow multiple human computation systems to work together so that each can benefit from the other's strengths. For example, a non-game system can request specific data from a game. The game can then tailor its game-play to deliver the required by-products from the players. This is also beneficial to the game because the requests become game content, creating variety in the game-play which helps to prevent players getting bored of the game. Mobile systems provide a particularly good test of human computation because they allow users to react to their environment. Real world environments are changeable and require higher levels of adaptation from the users. This means that, in addition to the human computation required by other systems, mobile systems can also take advantage of a user's ability to apply environmental context to the computational task. This research explores the effects of mutually reinforcing systems on mobile games with by-products. These effects will be explored by building and testing mutually reinforcing systems, including mobile games. A review of existing literature, human computation systems and games with by-products will set out problems which exist in outsourcing parts of a computational process to humans. Mutually reinforcing systems are presented as one approach of addressing some of these problems. Example systems have been created to demonstrate the successes and failures of this approach and their evolving designs have been documented. The evaluation of these systems will be presented along with a discussion of the outcomes and possible future work. A conclusion will summarize the findings of the work carried out. This dissertation shows that extending human computation techniques to allow the collection and classification of useful contextual information in mobile environments is possible and can be extended to allow the by-products to match the specific needs of another system