Game feature and expertise effects on experienced richness, control and engagement in game play

The extent to which game play is experienced as engaging is an important criterion for the playability of video games. This study investigates how video games can be designed towards increased levels of experienced engagement over time. For this purpose, two experiments were conducted in which a total of 35 participants repeatedly played a video game. Results indicate that experienced engagement is based on the extent to which the game provides rich experiences as well as by the extent to which the game provides a sense of control. In view of the influence of both game features and players’ expertise on the levels of experienced richness and control, it is concluded that game features should be modified over time to maintain optimal levels of engagement

Control freaks alert! : a clean interface to Beehive Technologies' ADB I/O using object-oriented Lingo

The ADB I/O by Beehive Technologies is a device which you can connect to a Macintosh to communicate with external electronics. Simply put, the ADB I/O provides digital inputs (to read switches), digital outputs (to switch things on or off) and analog inputs with 8-bit resolution (to read all kinds of sensors). For the Macintosh platform, it has opened up areas of application to mainstream users that were previously the sole territory of electronic hobbyists or users with high end data acquisition hardware. A few of those areas are home automation, robotics, kiosks, scientific experiments and product simulation. Many applications can communicate with the ADB I/O. One particularly powerful combination is the ADB I/O and Macromedia Director. Even if you intend to control your ADB I/O through AppleEvents or C/C++, you may find it worthwhile to test your set-up with Director. Director is easy to program, especially when it comes to the graphical user interface. There is of course a downside to Director's ease of use: the temptation of sloppy programming. Director does not require you to declare local variables or provide function prototypes. Add Director's cryptic error messages and your program can turn into a tangled mess which is difficult to debug. While this is of course undesirable for any program, with a program that communicates with external devices, for example motors, the consequences of messy programming may be more severe. This article aims to help you in battling messy Director code. By using Director's object-oriented features you will get to build a friendly and clean interface to the ADB I/O. In addition, in this article consistent naming for variables is used, which may be of help to you in writing your own scripts

Augmenting fun and beauty: a pamphlet

In this article we describe how the augmented reality and product design communities, which share the common interest of combining the real and the virtual, might learn from each other. From our side, we would like to share with you some of our ideas about product design which we consider highly relevant for the augmented reality community. In a pamphlet we list 10 sloganesque points for action which challenge the status quo in product design. Finally, we present some projects which show how these points could be implemented. We hope this approach will inspire those involved in augmented reality design and help them to avoid the pitfalls that the product design community is now trying to crawl out of

Exploring expression of form, action and interaction

The central theme in Ambient Intelligence is that powerful computation, communication and storage facilities are available, but are invisible. We believe that objects will play an important role as mediators. In order to make models of mediation and to study the mediation of behaviour, traditional modelling techniques, such as foam models, rendering etc. fall short. Although it is easy to make two-dimensional models of screens and front-panels and connect actions to the corresponding buttons, this approach is inadequate for new types of interfaces and behaviours which are not screen-based. Therefore we have experimented with an approach which we call 4D Sketching. The term 4D refers to the fact that it includes sketching in 3D space with the active behaviour adding a fourth, temporal dimension. We use foam, cardboard, a glue-gun, and other easy-to-use materials for the spatial sketching. We use a microprocessor, servo-motors and sensors to sketch active behaviour. The article describes the underlying philosophy, the technical aspects and a number of experiences gathered so-far, including student work from a project called Semotion

Tangible products : redressing the balance between appearance and action

Over the past decade, our group has approached interaction design from an industrial design point of view. In doing so, we focus on a branch of design called formgiving1. Traditionally, formgiving has been concerned with such aspects of objects as form, colour, texture and material. In the context of interaction design, we have come to see formgiving as the way in which objects appeal to our senses and motor skills. In this paper, we first describe our approach to interaction design of electronic products. We start with how we have been first inspired and then disappointed by the Gibsonian perception movement [1], how we have come to see both appearance and actions as carriers of meaning, and how we see usability and aesthetics as inextricably linked. We then show a number of interaction concepts for consumer electronics with both our initial thinking and what we learnt from them. Finally, we discuss the relevance of all this for tangible interaction. We argue that, in addition to a data-centred view, it is also possible to take a perceptual-motor-centred view on tangible interaction. In this view, it is the rich opportunities for differentiation in appearance and action possibilities that make physical objects open up new avenues to meaning and aesthetics in interaction design