Head Up Games : on the design, creation and evaluation of interactive outdoor games for children

This thesis proposes a new genre of outdoor games for children, namely Head Up Games. The concept was inspired by the observation that existing pervasive outdoor games for children were mostly played head down, as the predominantly screen-based interaction of existing games required constant attention of the children. First, the vision of Head Up Games is described and illustrated with several design cases (Chapter 2). In contrast to the head down games, Head Up Games aim to encourage and support rich social interaction and physical activity, play behaviors that are similar to play behaviors seen in traditional outdoor games (such as tag and hide-and-seek). The design process of Head Up Games poses several challenges. In User Centered Design it is commonly accepted to start the development of a new product using low-fi mock-ups, e.g., paper prototypes, and evaluate these with end-users. In the case of Head Up Games this proved to be difficult, as the emerging game experience is significantly altered when using paper prototypes. Therefore, a study was carried out that used high-fi prototypes, i.e. working, interactive, prototypes, from a very early stage in the design process (Chapter 3). This way, the effect of interactions on the game experience can be addressed earlier and better in the design process. Furthemore, having access to technology early in the design process, allows designers to better explore the design space. However, designers often do not possess adequate skills to quickly prototype interactive products, particularly products that need to be evaluated in an outdoor context. Such a development is often costly and time-consuming. Therefore, the RaPIDO platform was developed (Chapter 4). The platform not only includes the appropriate hardware for creating outdoor games, but is also bundled with software libraries, to allow designers not specifically trained in software engineering to adopt the platform easily. RaPIDO was evaluated using a case study methodology with two Industrial Design master students. The evaluation not only focused on the usability of the platform, but, more importantly, how the use of the platform affected the design process. The main conclusion of the study was that the designers indeed were able to rapidly create mobile games, and that the hardware offered was suitable for creating outdoor games. Furthermore, issues were identified with regard to writing the game software, e.g., managing the complexity of the software. Finally, for evaluating Head Up Games with children two methods were applied: the Outdoor Play Observation Scheme (OPOS) was used to quantify the intended play behavior. Furthermore, GroupSorter was developed to provide a framework to interview a group of children simultaneously, resulting in qualitative comments. Both OPOS and GroupSorter were applied for evaluating three Head Up Games, which are described in Chapter 5

Head up games:The games of the future will look more like the games of the past

With the emergence of pervasive technology, pervasive games came into existence. Most are location-aware applications, played with a PDA or mobile phone, We argue that the interaction paradigm these games support, limits outdoor play that often involves spontaneous social interaction. This paper introduces a new genre of pervasive games we call Head Up Games. The paper describes these games and how they differ from current research prototypes of pervasive games. Also, it outlines their characteristics and illustrates our vision with Camelot, an outdoor game for children.</p

TAPT and contextmapping : understanding how we understand experience

Teasing Apart, Piecing Together (TAPT) and Contextmapping (CM) are cross-disciplinary methods for understanding people's experiences, in order to build better products and services. Whereas TAPT concerns deconstructing and reconstructing experiences, CM is a method for accessing laypeople's tacit knowledge to support design. This article describes these methods, which have been used in domains including the humanities, software engineering, and industrial design. It describes a small comparative evaluation that explores the types of insight yielded by each method, and the contexts of use in which each method is suitable. Eight students worked in pairs on two design tasks, producing designs, responding to questionnaires, and participating in a group discussion. The design tasks were built to further the research of the second author, who assessed the designs in this context. Initial results showed that both methods were suitable for use, but that TAPT was better at dealing with emotional and social aspects of experience, and was faster and easier to use: TAPT was arguably better suited to the tasks. This study demonstrates a suitable approach for comparing design methods, and lets us identify the more important research questions about the use of TAPT and CM. The designs that our participants produced can be used in a future study to garner more insights, particularly about how informative and inspirational method outputs are. The strongest factors when deciding which method to use appear to be whether there is a desired focus on emotional and social facets, and the time available to apply the method

Programming by demonstration

Dit verslag beschrijft hoe Programming by Demonstration (PbD) kan worden toegepast om een systeem met één vrijheidsgraad. PbD stelt ons in staat om een robot te programmeren door de beweging meerdere malen voor te doen. Er wordt van deze demonstratiedata een Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) gemaakt en via Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) wordt een ‘geleerde’ curve bepaald. In dit verslag is gekeken naar parameters die van invloed zijn op het genereren van een nauwkeurige GMM en GMR en hoe deze parameters gekozen kunnen worden om een optimaal eindresultaat te behalen

Rule customization in head-up games

This research examines the feasibility of rule customization for a genre of pervasive games for children called Head-Up Games [11], which are intended to be played outdoors by children and to encourage physical activity and social interaction. An interface to allow customization of game rules was created. An evaluation involving 22 children aged 11--13, showed that children are able to customize the game and this can be an effective means of keeping them engaged with such games for longer periods

Five key challenges in end-user development for tangible and embodied interaction

As tangible and embodied systems are making the transition from the labs to everyday life, there is a growth in the applications related research and design work in this field. We argue that the potential of these technologies can be even further leveraged by enabling domain experts such as teachers, therapists and home owners to act as end-user developers in order to modify and create content for their tangible interactive systems. However, there are important issues that need to be addressed if we want to enable these end users to act as developers. In this paper we identify five key challenges for meta-designers in enabling end-users to develop for tangible and embodied interaction

Head Up Games : combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call "Head Up Games" (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges