33,594 research outputs found
Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?
Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany
Location-based technologies for learning
Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring location based technologies and their potential for educatio
Blowtooth: a provocative pervasive game for smuggling virtual drugs through real airport security
In this paper we describe a pervasive game, Blowtooth, in which players use their mobile phones to hide virtual drugs on nearby airline passengers in real airport check-in queues. After passing through airport security, the player must find and recover their drugs from the innocent bystanders, without them ever realizing they were involved in the game. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not, generally, regarded as playful or “fun”. This paper describes the game’s design and implementation as well as an evaluation conducted with participants in real airports. It explores the players’ reactions to the game through questionnaire responses and in-game activity. The technologies used in Blowtooth are, intentionally, simple in order for the enjoyment of the game to be reliant more on the physical environment rather than the enabling technologies. We conclude that situating pervasive games in unexpected and challenging environments, such as international airports, may provide interesting and unique gaming experiences for players. In addition, we argue that pervasive games benefit most from using the specific features and nature of interesting real-world environments rather than focusing on the enabling technologies
Blowtooth: pervasive gaming in unique and challenging environments
This paper describes Blowtooth, a Bluetooth implemented
pervasive game where players smuggle virtual drugs through real airport security with the help of unknowing bystanders. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not generally regarded as playful or “fun,” and where people are subject to particularly high levels of intrusive surveillance and monitoring. Six participants who were travelling internationally within a two-week period were recruited to evaluate the game. Findings suggest that creating pervasive games that incorporate the unique features of their context as part of the game may provide enjoyable, novel and thought-provoking experiences for players
Mobile Life: A Research Foundation for Mobile Services
The telecom and IT industry is now facing the challenge of a second IT-revolution, where the
spread of mobile and ubiquitous services will have an even more profound effect on commercial
and social life than the recent Internet revolution. Users will expect services that are unique and
fully adapted for the mobile setting, which means that the roles of the operators will change, new
business models will be required, and new methods for developing and marketing services have
to be found. Most of all, we need technology and services that put people at core. The industry
must prepare to design services for a sustainable web of work, leisure and ubiquitous technology
we can call the mobile life. In this paper, we describe the main components of a research agenda
for mobile services, which is carried out at the Mobile Life Center at Stockholm University. This
research program takes a sustainable approach to research and development of mobile and
ubiquitous services, by combining a strong theoretical foundation (embodied interaction), a welldefined
methodology (user-centered design) and an important domain with large societal
importance and commercial potential (mobile life). Eventually the center will create an
experimental mobile services ecosystem, which will serve as an open arena where partners from
academia and industry can develop our vision an abundant future marketplace for future mobile servíces
Enhanced reality live role playing
Live role-playing is a form of improvisational theatre played for the experience of the performers and without an audience. These games form a challenging application domain for ubiquitous technology. We discuss the design options for enhanced reality live role-playing and the role of technology in live role-playing games
Evaluation of a Pervasive Game for Domestic Energy Engagement Among Teenagers
In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and
their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased
game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena
for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition
scheme. We report on the game’s evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the
game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements
before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of
the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and
engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during
the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had
any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach
appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues
Undercurrents – A Computer-Based Gameplay Tool to Support Tabletop Roleplaying
This paper introduces Undercurrents, a computer-based gameplay tool for providing additional communication and media streams during tabletop roleplaying sessions. Based upon a client-server architecture, the system is intended to unobtrusively support secret communication, timing of audio and visual presentations to game events, and real-time documentation of the game session. Potential end users have been involved in the development and the paper provides details on the full design process
Heuristic usability evaluation on games: a modular approach
Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this
evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but
they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to
evaluate games usability is still Nielsen’s proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a
result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer
interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to
different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of
existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation
tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order
to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic
guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better
detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different
games, using both the Nielsen’s heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.Unión Europea PI055-15/E0
Children's Health: Evaluating the Impact of Digital Technology. Final Report for Sunderland City Council.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Children’s Health project sponsored by the City of Sunderland Digital Challenge project examined the impact of providing health-focused digital technologies to children aged 11-15 years, in terms of their usage and requirements of such technologies, and their subsequent behavioural changes.
The empirical study ran with three groups of six children over a period of seven weeks for each group. A console-based exercise game and an exercise-focused social website were used in the study and the focus was on opportunistic (unstructured/unplanned) exercise.
The emergent findings are:
• Data collected about physical activity must be more extensive than simple step counts.
• Data collection technologies for activities must be ubiquitous but invisible.
• Social interaction via technology is expected; positive messages reinforcing attainments of goals are valued; negative feedback is seen as demotivating.
• participants were very open to sharing information (privacy was not a concern).
• Authority figures have a significant impact on restricting adolescents’ use of technologies.
This document reports the how the study was conducted, analyses the findings and draws conclusions from these regarding how to use digital technologies to improve and/or maintain the physical activity levels of children throughout their adolescence and on into adulthood.
The appendices provide the detailed (anonymised) data collected during the study and the background literature review
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