Designing for the dichotomy of immersion in location based games

The interaction design of mixed reality location based games typically focuses upon the digital content of the mobile screen, as this is characteristically the primary navigational tool players use to traverse the game space. This emphasis on the digital over the physical means the opportunity for player immersion in mixed reality games is often limited to the single (digital) dimension. This research seeks to redress this imbalance, which is caused, in part, by the requirement for the player?s attention to be systematically switched between the two worlds, defined in this research as the ?Dichotomy of Immersion?. Using different design strategies we propose minimising the reliance of the player upon the mobile screen by encouraging greater observation of their physical surroundings. Using a ?research through design? approach for the mixed reality game PAC-LAN: Zombie Apocalypse, we illustrate design strategies for increasing immersion in location based games, which we believe will aid designers in enabling players to more readily engage with the physical context of the game and thus facilitate richer game experiences

Small business finance in two Chicago minority neighborhoods

The authors use survey data to measure the use of formal and informal sources of financing by owners of small businesses in two ethnic neighborhoods. The authors find substantial differences across ethnic groups in the amount of start-up funding obtained and in the use of trade credit.Small business ; Chicago (Ill.)

Development and application of a "spray-can" tool for fuzzy geographical analysis

Most information generated by the general public, particularly for the purpose of decision-support, will inherently contain a spatial component. This spatial data can comprise a very valuable resource for researchers, planners and decision makers, and may be collected for analysis using a Public Participation GIS (PPGIS). The imprecise and abstract nature of the thoughts, feelings and opinions of the public do not, however, lend themselves well to the discrete boundaries enforced by ‘traditional’ GIS data constructs (points, lines and polygons), and as such require data structures that allow for the ‘fuzzy’ nature of these data to be incorporated into their capture, storage and analysis. This paper therefore presents a web-based PPGIS platform with a ‘spray-can’ interface for the capture of fuzzy spatial data; and a relational ‘multi-point-and-attribute’ data structure, which reflects the fuzzy nature of the data, whilst supporting flexible spatial and attribute querying. Whilst the idea of the spray-can interface is not itself novel, the platform demonstrated in this paper has the potential to improve the decision-making process in a number of different areas at a variety of different scales. This is achieved by both increasing levels of interaction with the public through the familiar and user-friendly spray-can interface; and increasing the level of understanding of the spatial and aspatial information that participants contribute, by maximising the potential analytical approaches that may be taken

Visualizing patterns in spatially ambiguous point data

As technologies permitting both the creation and retrieval of data containing spatial information continue to develop, so do the number of visualisations using such data. This spatial information will often comprise a place-name that may be ‘geocoded’ into coordinates, and displayed on a map, frequently using a ‘heatmap-style’ visualisation to reveal patterns in the data. Across a dataset, however, there is often ambiguity in the geographic scale to which a place-name refers (country, county, town, street etc.), and attempts to simultaneously map data at a multitude of different scales will result in the formation of ‘false hotspots’ within the map. These form at the centres of administrative areas (countries, counties, towns etc.) and introduce erroneous patterns into the dataset whilst obscuring real ones, resulting in misleading visualisations of the patterns in the dataset. This paper therefore proposes a new algorithm to intelligently redistribute data that would otherwise contribute to these ‘false hotspots’, removing them to locations that likely reflect real-world patterns at a homogenous scale, and so allow more representative visualisations to be created, without the negative effects of ‘false hotspots’ resulting from multi-scale data. This technique demonstrated on a sample dataset taken from Twitter, and validated against the ‘geotagged’ portion of the same dataset

Evaluating the spraycan:understanding participant interaction with a PPGIS

Whilst widely accepted as an important facet of software design, the evaluation of PPGIS usability is often overlooked in research. This work comprises a novel approach to the evaluation of the Spraycan PPGIS, whereby rich insights into participant behaviour are drawn from data that are natively collected by the platform as opposed to through additional questionnaires, log files or similar. The approach will be validated against a ‘traditional’ questionnaire, before conclusions are drawn relating to the usability of the Spraycan as a platform for the collection of vague spatial data, in the hope of developing a greater understanding into the way in which people interact with geographic problems

Revealing flows in the local economy through visualisations:customers, clicks/cliques and clusters

It is well known by now, that the world has suffered an economic downturn. This has led many governments and organisations to invest resources into researching varying strategies to combat such problem. For some time now, governments have been promoting growth by encouraging local spending; we have witnessed this through ?shop local? campaigns and local currencies. We introduce BARTER a moBile sociAl netwoRking supporTing local Ethical tRading system to tackle this issue, at it?s core an information system that encompasses technology, social media and business analytics are brought together to engage customers, traders and citizens to spend locally by featuring the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of trading local. After situating BARTER at the heart of the community (with varying traders in and around Lancaster, UK) for some time, this paper is a follow on from a ?BARTER Visualisations? design concept, reporting on the progression and recent developments in the project. Whilst these systems are in place within the community, further research is being conducted to evaluate if revealing and transforming transaction data in a playful and informative manner will help citizens better understand the flow of money in the local economy