Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2011

In this paper, we present a storytelling system able to dramatize interactive narratives in augmented reality over a conventional sheet of paper. The system allows users to freely interact with virtual characters by sketching objects on the paper. Users interacting with the system can indirectly affect the characters’ decisions, even to the point of radically subverting the storyline.

At the intersection of multimedia, artificial intelligence, and gaming technology, new visions of future entertainment media arise that approximate the “Holodeck” ® idea of interactive storytelling. We report exploratory experiments on the user experience in a ‘classic’, foundational application of interactive storytelling, “Façade” (Mateas & Stern, 2002), and compare results with an identical experiment carried out with users of the adventure game “Fahrenheit”. A total of

N

= 148 participants used one of the systems interactively or watched a pre-recorded video sequence of the application without interactive involvement. Using a broad range of entertainment-related measures, the experience of Interactive Storytelling was found to depend strongly on interactivity (mostly in “Façade”) and to differ substantially across the systems, with “Façade” achieving a stronger connection between interactive use and the resulting profile of entertainment experiences.

Interactive digital storytelling has attracted a great deal of research interest in recent years. However, most interactive stories are told following a goal-oriented and task-based mode, which motivates the player to interact with stories by achieving the goals rather than empathizing with the characters and experience the enriched emotions. Given this fact, we propose an emotion-driven interactive digital storytelling approach based on Smith and Lazarus’ cognitive theory of emotion. In this approach, the player’s emotions, as a driving force, motivate the story forward and contribute to their experience directly and explicitly. To evaluate this approach, an interactive video was made by re-editing existing footage of the TV comedy

Ugly Betty

and ten players were interviewed afterwards. The results reveal that the interviewees’ experience is largely influenced by their gender and favorite media entertainment.

This paper proposes a language based on temporal logics to specify constraints on nondeterministic stories, generated by interactive storytelling systems, taking into account that time is continuous and branched. These constraints are checked, in real time, during story generation. Constraints to be checked are described by temporal formulas over the properties of the story. To make possible the verification in real time, it is assumed that these properties are piecewise-linear functions. A prototype, using Constraint Logic Programming for the verification of properties, is operational.

Many people do not get the recommended 30 minutes of exercise per day, which can result in health problems such as obesity, muscle atrophy and chronic disease. Based on the principles of casual games and exergames, we propose and define casual exergames for motivating people to exercise in multiple small chunks of time throughout the day. We designed, implemented, and tested a casual exergame called GrabApple. Our preliminary results show that users enjoyed playing the casual exergame and that in just 10 minutes of play, their heart rate was elevated to an average of 72% of maximum heart rate, and that they burned an average of 91.8 Calories. If played three times per day, our casual exergame produced sufficient physical activity to meet current fitness guidelines. We discuss the potential health benefits of casual exergames.

Games for rehabilitation are developing rapidly in recent years. It has been shown that utilization of therapy and gaming technology affects positively on the patients’ physical and mental condition. However, to this day there are only few playable games for Parkinson’s disease patients. This paper presents the development process of WuppDi! – a collection of five motion-based games for Parkinson’s disease patients, aimed at supporting their exercises routines in various playful environments. We describe the game design challenges for Parkinson’s disease patients and our solutions used in the games. Finally, we present the results of a conducted field test showing a very positive motivational effect among the majority of the patients but also highlighting remaining issues and technical difficulties, which can be beneficial for the future development in this field.

A universal game,

Daruma

, has been developed that can be played by both healthy people and people with physical limitations. It is based on the Japanese variation of the traditional outdoor children’s game Red Light, Green Light. We devised two ways to play the game: one is by swinging an arm; the other is by tapping a desk with two fingers. Players can select either of these choices, enabling people with physical limitations to enjoy the game. We conducted experiments to verify their ease of play and to evaluate their degrees of enjoyment and utility. We found that both ways of playing were appropriate for the visually impaired and that healthy people also enjoyed playing

Daruma

.

Exergames encourage physical activity, but generally require specialized hardware and prescribed activities; whereas pervasive accumulated context exergames (PACEs) allow players to choose their type of exercise, but have limited depth of play. For mass commercialization of PACEs, facilitating long-term behavioural change, we propose two requirements: that PACEs support large-scale and flexible deployment; and that the design of PACEs support staying power through long-term playability. From these requirements, we motivate six PACE design principles and use these principles to develop a multiplayer roleplaying PACE. Results from a week-long study of our game showed that by satisfying the six design principles, we can create a PACE with scalability and staying power. Our results are the first step toward creating PACEs that promotes long-term game engagement, which is needed for activity-related behaviour change.

In human-computer interaction, it is important to offer the users correct modalities for particular tasks and situations. Unless the user has the suitable modality for a task, neither task performance nor user experience can be optimised. The aim of this study is to assess the appropriateness of using a steady-state visually evoked potential based brain-computer interface (BCI) for selection tasks in a computer game. In an experiment participants evaluated a BCI control and a comparable automatic speech recogniser (ASR) control in terms of workload, usability and engagement. The results showed that although BCI was a satisfactory modality in completing selection tasks, its use in our game was not engaging for the player. In our particular setup, ASR control appeared to be a better alternative to BCI control.

Game reviews are used by game developers for making business decisions and measuring the success of a title, and have been shown to affect player perception of game quality. We conducted a study where players read positive or negative reviews of a game before playing, and show that the valence of review text affected game ratings and that these differences could not be explained by mediating changes in mood. Although we show predictable changes in player experience over the course of the study (measured objectively through physiological sensors), there were no objective differences in experience depending on review valence. Our results suggest that reading reviews does not directly affect play experience, but rather is a post-play cognitive rationalization of the experience with the content of the review. Our results are important for understanding player experience and to the game industry where reviews and user forums affect a game’s commercial success.

The well-established Quality of Service and the relatively recently emerged Quality of Experience research topics are unquestionably linked, yet to date little effort has been invested in the study of their precise correlation and mutual reciprocity. This paper examines the impact of three representative QoS-related parameters on user QoE in the particular context of location-based multiplayer games played on mobile devices. The choice for this research context is motivated by the rapidly expanding popularity of this application domain. Analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results from an empirical study involving 32 participants confirms that modifications in the performance of the investigated technical parameters does indeed hold implications for the quality of the users’ experiences; at the same time, the results clarify the magnitude of these implications. Our findings are valuable as they provide practical insight in the QoS/QoE relationship and can hence aid software developers in delivering high-quality usage experiences to their customers.

3D video games are a popular form of entertainment that features elaborate visual compositions and settings. Occasionally, players are thrown into situations with a high amount of visual complexity, which may cause players, especially novice players, to misinterpret important game goals or mechanics, which may, in turn, lead to a diminished experience. Previous research investigated visual design, but only in terms of brightness and color contrast, no research investigated attributes of motion, their complexity in regards to visual design, and their effect on the game experience. Informed by cinema and visual perception domains, we embark on a study of 4 motion attributes: flicker, shape, speed, and repetition, and investigate their design within 6 games. We rate these games based on their complexity. We use video coding with a kappa reliability measure to identify these attributes. We then investigate the relationship between the use of these motion attributes and the rated complexity of the visual scene. We present this analysis as a contribution, and design lessons extrapolated based on the analysis.

Recent advances in commercial technology increase the use of stereoscopy in games. While current applications display existing games in real-time rendered stereoscopic 3D, future games will also feature S3D video as part of the virtual game world, in interactive S3D movies, or for new interaction methods. Compared to the rendering of 2D video within a 3D game scene, displaying S3D video includes some technical challenges related to rendering and adaption of the depth range. Rendering is exclusively possible on professional hardware not appropriate for gaming. Our approach, Multi-pass Stereoscopic Video Rendering (MSVR), allows to present stereoscopic video streams within game engines on consumer graphics boards. We further discuss aspects of performance and occlusion of virtual objects. This allows developers and other researchers to easily apply S3D video with current game engines to explore new innovations in S3D gaming.

Useful and durable knowledge can be built upon the experience of discovering and the construction of a contextual awareness. In this article we present a tool to browse a catalog of 3D objects taken from the

Musée des arts et métiers de Paris

. The purpose of this multimedia kiosk is to enhance the visit experience by helping users to built meaningful relations between objects and scientific fields. Users select subjects of interest during the visit by collecting cards placed beside the real objects in the museums galleries. The cards are tagged with reactvision fiducial marks that enable the user to manipulate the 3D object representation on the screen. We present this tool and we focus more precisely on interaction issues both for individuals and groups in a public context and for a private use at home.

We present a camerawork module for representing events in a virtual museum with a comic style. The module uses four basic camera shots, i.e., internal, external, apex, and group, to compose a shot sequence of two main events happening in a museum, i.e., move and stay. This module is fully implemented in a comic generation system we have been developing for summarizing user experiences in Second Life. Visual comparison, with a baseline camerawork, confirms the effectiveness of the proposed camerawork module.

We present a system which aids content management during the pre- and post-processing aspects of digital film production. Editors can synchronize their footage with their imported scripts to help in the organization of the video "bin". In addition to this, we provide a zoomable interface to facilitate the process and help organize pre-production media such as images, and video clips.

Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) has (re-)emerged as a major technological trend [12]. Hence, many game designers are challenged to avoid S3D pitfalls whilst creating innovative and entertaining gameplay experiences. We analyze the challenges and opportunities of S3D game design. Based on a review of related findings in the fields of perceptual psychology and 3D movie making, we propose a catalogue of fundamental and innovative concepts for S3D game design that shall lead to new and differentiating game developments.

In the present work we develop an experimental setting to evaluate the influence of affect – more precisely, of simulated coherent fluctuations in mood and emotional states – in the construction of empathy in synthetic characters for interactive digital entertainment. Our goal is to evaluate whether the impression of interacting with human-like agents can be more relevant than purely utilitarian metrics for user preferences to interact with systems in certain situations. We have built affective agents to play computer games against human users, and assessed empirically the extent to which users consider more engaging to play against the affective agents than to play against agents that are easy to beat.

Balancing timing of tasks and abilities in multiplayer games is an important design element, but two time balancing issues are currently difficult to deal with: individual differences in experience or skill, and real-world elements that impose fixed temporal constraints on the game (as in mixed-reality games). We introduce

adaptive time-variant minigames

as a way of addressing the problems of time balancing. These minigames are parameterized to allow both a guaranteed minimum play time (to address fixed temporal constraints), and dynamic adaptability (to address temporal variances caused by individual differences). We developed three adaptive time-variant minigames and carried out two studies with them. The studies showed that the adaptation mechanisms allow accurate prediction of play time, that the minigames were valuable in helping to balance temporal asymmetries in a real mixed-reality game, and that they did not detract from the overall play experience.

In this article, we demonstrate the use of composing ‘experience’ in the form of piece location probability values derived from a database of matein- 3 chess problems. This approach was compared against a ‘random’ one. Comparisons were made using ‘experiences’ derived from three different databases, i.e. problems by human composers (HC), computer-generated compositions that used the HC experience (CG), and mating ‘combinations’ taken from tournament games between humans (TG). Each showed a reasonable and statistically significant increase in efficiency compared to the random one but not each other. Aesthetically, the HC and CG were better than the others. The results suggest that composing efficiency and quality can be improved using simple probability information derived from human compositions, and unexpectedly even from the computer-generated compositions that result. Additionally, these improvements come at a very low computational cost. They can be used to further aid and entertain human players and composers.

Because they offer an easy entry into play, casual games have become an increasingly popular leisure activity among children and teenagers, engaging particularly broad target audiences. In this paper, we present a casual game that addresses childhood cancer: Besides mere entertainment, a health game that focuses on cancer may serve as a clinical tool in order to teach children about the particularities of the disease and initiate discussion among cancer patients, their parents and medical staff. In this context, the results of an empirical study revealed a generally high acceptance of the health game among young patients, while parents and medical staff highlighted the educational potential of health games addressing cancer. Additionally, we discuss the challenges of evaluating digital games in a hospital setting which were revealed during the evaluation phase.

The general research goal that motivates this work is the aim to produce new knowledge at the intersection between art and technology. The practical goal of the project reported in this paper is to strengthen pupils’ interest in computer science and art and to present pupils with possibilities of becoming creators of digital media rather than pure consumers. To reach our practical goal a group of researchers and artists designed and implemented a workshop program for children based on the open source software tool Scratch and the artistic idea of ReMida centers based on recycling and reusing waste materials. The workshops have been documented by notes and pictures which serve as data for workshop evaluation.

We describe the use of an entertainment computer narrative game to teach words to a child in a special education process. In order to observe the potential of this kind of game, we chosen a child who has difficult to learn some words using a basic computer tool at writing learning special education environment. The results showed that narrative games and its entertainment resources can be a good way to allow child reads and writes words considering different sentences and contexts, as well as, resources of the game can be a useful strategy to engage child on the storytelling.

In this paper we discuss the Future Delta game, as a time-forward 3-D visualization and simulation tool that aims to motivate actions and behavioral changes and to educate players about climate change mitigation and adaptations solutions and challenges. The game simulation is situated in a recognizable community locale: the flood-prone neighborhood of Delta, BC. Combining climate change modeling, socioeconomic scenario analysis and 3D modeling of real places with engaging soundscapes and imagery, our game is designed to make climate change science and solutions more salient and understandable to the layperson. The project comprises a game simulation and dynamic 3D visualizations of future local climate change scenarios to provide an environment for experiential learning tied to place attachment. The project builds on a foundation rich in research, experimentation, and production in the topic of climate change in Delta, but extends previous work into a new representational platform of virtual game. An initial testing of the game shows that engaging with the game strengthened the user’s belief that action can be taken to mitigate climate change and increased their support for more transformative social changes to achieve climate mitigation and adaptation.

Standard or normalized file formats exist since many years to write/read/exchange 3D scene descriptions. However, these descriptions are mainly for visual contents. Options given for sound compositions of 3D scenes are either lacking or poor. In this paper, we propose to include rich sound descriptions in the COLLADA standard, a commonly used scene language. Our work relies on a research project, the goal of which is to define and develop a sound engine for virtual cities. In this context we have implemented and experimented a first version of sound descriptions in COLLADA.

This paper describes the analysis of a simple, free-to-play Real Time Strategy game called

Pixel Legions

. In developing this analysis, we worked with the developer to instrument, collect, and analyze telemetry data. Due to the specifics of the designers’ inquiries, we developed a visualization system that enables us to answer specific micro-level questions in a way that is easy for the designer to understand how players learned and played the game. Our contribution constitutes the system we built and the analysis we developed to answer the questions imposed by the designer.

In this paper we present a novel complete framework for creating realistic facial animation given only one neutral facial image as an input data. Our approach is carried on in a two-dimensional image space, instead of three-dimensional space. In addition, we employ an advanced computer vision method (digital image matting) as well as conventional image processing techniques (texture synthesis and image warping) in order to express more realistic facial animations. The major contribution of this work is showing how facial animation with a variety of realistic expressions can be generated very efficiently, where not only main facial components (e.g., eyeball, eyebrow and lip) but also pseudo-depth values obtained from their alpha mattes are utilized in our system. Simulations with real image confirm that our scheme produces high quality facial animations with an ease.

Designing satisfactory, quick and precise control schemes for shooters on consoles remains one of the major game play programming challenges today. Besides the application of game situation specific control aids like soft locking even simple and game unspecific filtering approaches can improve the control quality significantly. In this paper we will objectify and quantify this effect that is well known among game developers as heuristic knowledge.

The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should People are increasingly interacting via online services - from forums, online communities, social networks and online computer games. While there has been considerable research on the motivations and communication of people online, as well as the social environment provided by online services, large-scale analyses of the virtual identities people use online are rare. In this paper, the first large-scale analysis of virtual identities in the massively multi-player online game WORLD OF WARCRAFT® is presented based on a dataset of nearly eight million avatar names and associated information. The results presented highlight the inventiveness of the names the users of WORLD OF WARCRAFT® express in terms of naming their virtual identities and the varied nature of the sources of inspiration for these names, which range from mythology, literature, popular culture, real-world names and others. The results also indicate that how players name their characters is influenced by the aesthetics and game function of the characters. The server type also appears to have an impact on player naming strategies, with role-playing servers forming a distinct cluster from Player-vs-Player type servers. Additionally, the analysis presented reveals that character name frequencies follow, similar to real-world names, a power law distribution.

Memories define us as individuals and are considered a special aspect of one’s life. We try to preserve our memories as much as possible by taking pictures, videos, or through any form of documentation that we can revisit later on in our lives. Our goal is to design an immersive system that allows rich documentation of the past and interactive 3D-revisitation of the stored reflections in the future. Our prototype system,

the Looking Glass

captures human experiences and allows users to interactively explore them. Our system, unlike classic methods of documentation, extends the experience of visiting memories beyond viewing, and affords an immersive interactive experience.

The Looking Glass

is envisioned to provide a 3D visual experience of revisiting past scenes, allowing a more entertaining and emotionally engaging personal approach to re-experiencing past memories. This short paper presents our research motivation and design approach, details our implementation efforts, and current prototype.

This paper briefly presents a player satisfaction model called BrainHex, which was based on insights from neurobiological findings as well as the results from earlier demographic game design models (DGD1 and DGD2). The model presents seven different archetypes of players: Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind, Conqueror, Socialiser, and Achiever. We explain how each of these player archetypes relates to older player typologies (such as Myers-Briggs), and how each archetype characterizes a specific playing style. We conducted a survey among more than 50,000 players using the BrainHex model as a personality type motivator to gather and compare demographic data to the different BrainHex archetypes. We discuss some results from this survey with a focus on psychometric orientation of respondents, to establish relationships between personality types and BrainHex archetypes.

We explore the concept of interactive technology that is implicitly controlled by emotions, via wearable physiology sensors. We describe a proof-of-concept emotion-reactive stock trading software that interrupts trades that appear to be entered under an unusual amount of stress. We describe a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor armband that broadcasts stress events via Bluetooth to a prisoner’s dilemma game application on an Android phone, which alters its behavior when the user is stressed. We carried out pilot evaluation of this system’s effects on the consistency of decisions made under stress.

Understanding players’ gameplay behaviors, performance abilities, and interests is a growing research area due to its utility in developing knowledge and theory that can enhance game design. Much previous research exists within this area, however, none of these works deeply investigated player behavior and its relation to knowledge/skills gained by playing specific genres. This topic is important, as knowledge gained from playing different genres influences players’ game behaviors. Knowing the details of the skills gained and their influence on performance will allow designers to make informed decisions about their game design given knowledge about target audience’s playing habits. In this paper, we address this issue. In particular, we discuss results of a study conducted with 35 college participants to explore the influence of prior gaming experience, specifically with Role Playing and First Person Shooter games, on knowledge/skills related to their ability to navigate and solve spatial puzzles in 3D games.

Location-Based Games (LBGs) have been gaining both academic and industrial interest in the past few years. Utilizing location information, LBGs enable users to extend their social game-play from cyberspace to the real-world. However, sharing personal information particularly the physical location of users is likely to raise privacy concerns resulting in eroding players’ social experience. To further explore this issue, we investigated the impacts of two attributes of privacy, avatar realism and location-awareness, on the players’ perceived social presence during a designed LBG. The results indicated that the social presence was not significantly affected by the applied privacy configurations. However, players’ negative feelings decreased when photographic images of players were used as their avatars. Further, players desired to share their physical location and sacrifice location privacy in order to track other players. Our findings suggest that a well-designed LBG can lessen users’ location privacy concerns.

Social gaming is now surpassing traditional gaming in terms of the total number of players. We describe our research in creating

VivoSpace

, an online social network application that applies the rapid uptake of social gaming to the domain of serious games for personal health. Specifically, VivoSpace aims to leverage social gaming to motivate positive health behavior change. A user centered design process has begun for designing VivoSpace based on an initial user inquiry questionnaire that revealed key motivations for using online social networks and users’ thoughts on health. Interview feedback of the paper prototypes highlighted reluctance to share particular types of health information and apprehension in logging daily information. However, people were fond of the social aspect of sharing personal health information in the context of group challenges and participating in group health activities.

The idea of outsourcing geospatial data creation tasks to the crowd (volunteered geographic information, VGI) has become quite popular in the field of geographic information science (GIScience). As one approach to VGI, location-based games (LBGs) have been shown to be successful in motivating non-expert users to collect and tag geospatial data. However, the central VGI problem of data quality has so far not been solved satisfyingly. Previous studies show that games that reward their players for in- or post-game data reviewing can assure only a validation rate of about 40% of the data. We address this problem with a new LBG design pattern, based on game rules that encourage players to take the decisions of others into account while making their data collecting decisions. We empirically evaluate the new pattern by comparing the positional accuracy of data collected with two different rule sets for the LBG

GeoSnake

. Our pattern is shown to result in a significant accuracy improvement.

We present a work-in-progress novel framework for the creation, delivery and viewing of multi-view hypermedia intended for mobile platforms. We utilize abstractions over creation and delivery of content and a unified language scheme (through XML) for communication between components. The delivery mechanism incorporates server-side processing to allow inclusion of additional features such as computer vision-based analysis or visual effects. Multi-view video is streamed live to mobile devices which offer several mechanisms for viewing hypermedia and perspective selection.

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) have come very far in the last ten years. Great works by the likes of Steve Peters, Christy Dena and Jim Miller have pushed the genre forward, but it still lacks some of the tools created for other types of games. The design process for ARGs is, in the best case scenario, complicated. Given the enormous amount of media these kind of games use, things can escalate from complex to utterly impossible in the blink of an eye and sadly, there are currently no tools to help solve this problem or lower its impact in the finished game. This paper proposes Cheshire, a framework to enable categorization of games and alignment of these with defined sets of patterns previously detected in the design of the experience. This tool will help maintain the generated experience as loyal to the original concept as possible, and graphically represent which elements will support it in the best manner.

We propose a web system called CiVo (City Voice) that is capable of visualizing public conversations on the Internet. It monitors the posting on the Twitter with respect to a set of specific phrases and displays the correspondent movie clips with cartoons on the time line on CiVo when it finds them. It extends the Twitter to a visual social medium that allows people to share what happens in the world at a glance. The main loop of CiVo runs on PHP while monitoring the Twitter using its API and it returns a specific SWF file to the HTTP clients for each GET request. The SWF file always updates its sub-SWFs reflecting the phrases found on the Twitter.

Re:Cycle

is a visual poem, improvised in real-time by a system of deceptively simple rules relating to luminance and chrominance values in a set of moving image shots. Richly textured natural images of snow, mountains, rivers, and sky slowly unfold in a never-ending sequence that constantly changes. The resulting complex ambient video repudiates the standard cinematic conventions of linear narrative, and draws the viewer into an active creation of meaning for the work.

We have built Tippy, a micro telepresence robot that allows a user to remotely project him or herself into another space, move around, and communicate via video and audio. An iPod Touch running Skype provides the robot with wireless video input and output capabilities and handles the movement commands from the remote user. In order to handle the robot’s movement without implementing an additional medium, we inserted the control signals visually into the video and detect the signals via light sensors connected to the motor drive system. By optically coupling the mobile device display with the robot’s drive-train control, we reduce the amount of software and hardware interfacing required for the end application.

Making the “I Still Remember” documentary’s memory floating bubbles interactive with audience’s participation using a near day-to-day OpenGL (aimed at later enhancements with haptics). We describe a simple process of making a passive documentary interactive using available tools and preserving the aesthetic and emotional appeal. Moreover, the good comparison of the linear convention film and its nonlinear narrative version with audiences’ body movement involvement may give answers to some of the artists who are still hesitating to adapt their projects to the dramatic developed new technology.

Recently, we have a lot of musical pieces due to a large capacity of storage. However, it would be difficult to select the song with bibliographic data as the capacity of the music database increases. Therefore, we proposed an emotional song selection system. In this study, the Acoustic - Emotion model was composed by relating the acoustic fluctuation features that can explain the time variation of music with the emotional evaluations of music obtained through the subjective evaluation experiments. Based on the model, the emotional evaluations of music were calculated from their acoustic features. Using the proposed system, user can select the song with the adjective words and their degrees.

While violent media has adverse effects on cognition, emotion and behavior, prosocial content promotes these variables in a prosocial way. Greater individual levels of empathy as well as increasing the level of empathy in media content typically foster prosocial behavior and reduce aggression. Two experiments replicated game content findings, and also showed that inducing empathy prior to a video game had a positive influence on behavior. However, under certain circumstances, inducing empathy before playing a violent video game may even have negative effects on behavior. As empathy is a common tool in prevention programs, the implications of these findings are discussed.

Online social networks can potentially play an important role in connecting older adults with family and friends who often live far. However, adoption of social Web services among the elderly is still very limited because the user interfaces are not adapted to them and also because few of their friends use such services. This paper introduces a mobile Web application designed with older adults’ characteristics in mind that integrates a popular social network.

As the potential of the video game medium expands, new design challenges come to light. In this paper, we present the design of a wearable vibrotactile feedforward display for novice players. The device, named “The Gauntlet Guide,” is designed to provide vibrotactile guidance cues during navigation tasks in a fast-paced, visual- and audio-intensive video game. We report on a preliminary study in which we assessed the reliability, ergonomics and appeal of the display. Our findings support continued research on haptic feedforward as a viable technique for scaffolding the learning curve in modern video game environments and engaging novice players in gameplay.

This paper is about the study on an artwork, a Ink-and-Wash Painting that has been expressed through a digital algorithm. Ink-and-Wash Painting were popular during the Chosun era [1] reigned by kings and officials [2]. It is the intention of this paper to study the potential of expressing Ink-and-Wash Painting through interaction, and present a direction that can coincide with modern paintings by developing Ink-and-Wash Painting from a traditional aspect through analyzing the theories and techniques instilled in my work.

This study introduces a digital keepsake box that enhances communications among group users, such as family members and friends, who are living at a distance. It allows users to virtually share items that involve common interests and memories. The box also increases awareness of the existence of other users by slightly opening the cover of the box when other users put items in their box. The results of user studies suggest that the digital keepsake box is useful in enhancing remote communications.

This paper presents an Emotionally Intelligent Contents (EIC) framework. This framework helps to create content that changes its elements (such as textures, color, light and sound) dynamically in response to a user’s emotional state. Also, this emotionally intelligent content allows users to add their own emotion characters at run-time. This paper presents an overview of the EIC framework designed to adapt a game environment to a user’s emotional state as measured physiologically or through an explicit rating of one’s affective state. It will then describe a couple of applications built with this framework.

Exercise is vital to maintaining good health, but many people neglect to work out regularly or often enough. One reason is the lack of will to take part in physical activities. We believe that interactive technologies can play a role in providing entertaining and implicitly educational mechanisms that will help people pursue healthy physical activities. As an example to our approach we present a mixed reality pet,

Mootchi

, which will provide users with an emotional incentive for exercising, indirectly acting as a persuasive physical trainer. This short paper outlines our prototype implementation and initial findings based on a design critique of

Mootchi

.

Third Space is thinking differently of the significance and meanings of space progressing beyond the inadequacy of dualism, as in mental and physical space. The discourse on Third space emerges to set aside the ‘either/or’ manner of binary categorizing to encompass ‘both/and also’ logic that allows an ‘Other’ set of options. The online social networking is the newest thing in creating connectivity and the identities. This paper is an attempt to comprehend and recognize the dynamics of the concept of Third space through the online social networking realm.

This paper is concerned with game information dynamics. Information and information kinetic energy are derived using existing models. Based on Einstein’s special relativity theory, it is suggested that when the velocity of information particles is slightly smaller than the speed of light, our mental concentration increases enormously.

Interactivity, the most prominent characteristic of digital media paradigm, generally means a relationship in the communication between human and human, human and machine, or media and media interacting each other. This work is interactive art and is produced to prepare a foundation for closer communication between human and human based on technology.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual design of an entertainment system, which would utilize a combination of lifelogging and bio-signal measuring techniques for capturing unconscious communication flow coming from a user. We expect this system could interpret the user’s unconsciousness and generate an emotionally rich feedback framed in a narrative, which would be tailored according to the universal symbolic patterns. This concept aims to explore a new area of entertainment computing. The discussed system looks promising to proceed with future work.

Maritime City is an educational tool for training Healthcare professionals, currently targeted towards Social Workers. It has its roots in the serious games area and is developed in a commercial game engine. This paper presents some initial results from testing the game with in-practice Social Workers in the context of child protection, with the aim to show equivalence between this approach and more traditional methods. The testing found that the game was realistic (apart from in some areas, which has provided new directions for the research) and also showed that there are many areas of the game experience that impact on the learning in ways similar to that of traditional role-play.

An important class of features centered on recognition (i.e. the ability to reconize images, speech, gestures, etc) is rapidly becoming available on UX (user eXperience) devices. This requires high performance computing to support recognition with low-latency, low power and high throughput. In this paper, we investigate the UX technologies and find opportunity to accelerate the UX technology on embedded systems.

Clutter

is the random yet structured placement of objects in a room. We describe a procedural clutter generator that achieves believable, varied, and controllable object placement using a hierarchical colored Petri net capable of expressing any computable set of object placement constraints.

We reflect on our experiences using an experimental platform for rapidly prototyping physical control configurations for multiplayer games. We describe how the architecture permits novel forms of collaborative play through the combination and configuration of basic tangible/physical building blocks, the deep integration between physical and virtual objects, and flexibility in how physical and virtual spaces are mapped onto each other. We also identify three important limitations of the architecture that became apparent through our prototyping efforts.

This paper discusses on-set previsualization with distributed motion capture, virtual camera and asset control, and real-time rendering using a video game engine. Our test harness, RTFX, demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of a system that couples Epic Games’ UnrealEngine3 with the Houdini 3D animation kit by Side Effects Software and a passive motion capture system by Vicon.

Conducting surveys is a costly and time-consuming process. We developed a playful questionnaire that addresses the issue of motivation for voluntary participation. In addition, distributing playful questionnaires on Facebook gives access to basic user data, which may allow employing some of them as quality control questions or simply help to lessen the number of questions.

The urge to improve the life of older adults grows as this segment of society expands. Computers have an enormous potential to benefit the lives of older adults, however, the unawareness or disregard of their characteristics, renders technology, many times, impossible to use. Peripherals are a common obstacle when learning to operate computers, because the most common ones do not directly map the input in the user interface. It has been argued that touch- and gesture-based user interfaces, due to their direct mapping of input, can reduce the obstacles that older adults face, when using the computer. To assess this, this paper presents a project that uses a multi-touch tabletop system as a gaming platform for older adults. Specifically, it reports on the low-fidelity prototype that was built to test whether tangible objects can be used. Conclusions regarding the viability of tangible objects for that purpose are also drawn.

The paper discusses

Jeddah

, an interactive artwork that experiments with the relation between cursor and background art. In addition to being functional, the cursor is also cast as an element of artistic expression. It is exaggerated in shape, scale, color and motion to blend in with the background art, and is constantly transforming in response to the art world. This is done to enhance the mood and experience of spatial exploration of

Jeddah

’s world.

Various types of new communication media have recently emerged such as e-mails, blogs, and social networks. We try to investigate this recent trend in communication in this paper based on the long history of human communications. Further, we want to elucidate that this trend could be interpreted as a shift from logical to emotional communications. We simultaneously want to clarify that this recent trend has its origins in the invention of movies and telephony in the late 19th century.

Whereas traditional games have employed entirely physical interfaces, computer games provide a generally virtual alternative. Motivated by interest in supporting conventional gameplay in the computer environment, we investigate the benefits of game interaction techniques based on gestures applied to tangible objects, comparing the user experience with that resulting from more virtualized interaction. Our study is applied in the context of a German-style board game, Settlers of Catan. Significant findings indicate a preference for tangible components for complex interaction tasks.

In mixed reality installations we have to integrate a variety of technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, animated virtual agents and robotic agents. In this paper we describe some of our explorations with a game engine as the driving software for mixed reality installations.

This workshop brings together game development professionals and experts of model-driven software development (MDSD). MDSD can improve the way software is developed by providing a higher level of abstraction and model-to-model transformation respectively model-to-text generation by automated tools. With this workshop, we want to identify how game development can benefit from MDSD. Thereby, the workshop focuses on a strong collaboration of both expert groups to determine the chances, challenges, and boundaries of introducing MDSD to the game domain.

This workshop is dedicated to discussing the user experience of an emerging new type of entertainment computing: Interactive stories. Technology development in Interactive Storytelling (IS) has made substantial progress recently, but theory and empirical studies on the user perspective have not received much attention in the entertainment computing community so far. The workshop introduces a measurement toolkit for testing user experiences in IS prototypes and stimulates discussion on conceptual as well as methodological issues in user-focused research on IS.

The tutorial is devoted mainly to PhD students, researchers, educators, and artists who are interested to learn, practice, and reflect about software tools for creativity and art. In this work, we chose to focus on open source software and its intersection with art. This choice is motivated by significant related work in open source software and art and available software for art like Processing, Arduino, and Scratch. Four research questions will shape the discussion: 1) Development or use of software? 2) Who are the stakeholders? 3) How to evaluate art and technology works? 4) Are there feelings beyond creativity and amusement one should aim at when designing art and technology expressions?

Gamification is simple common sense - why not apply decades of games industry design and experience to non-game businesses and software in order to attract users, improve engagement, and build loyalty and community? But the concept of gamification is mired in confusion - does it mean simply stapling a game to non-game software? “decorating” web sites with a thin veneer of game-like graphics and mechanics? Badges and leaderboards? Or is it something more subtle and powerful - thinking like a game designer in uncovering the real challenges, rewards and engagement loops in any interactive situation (and what situations in real life are not interactive in some way or another?) and building on those to make real world tasks more intuitive, engaging and fun? In this talk, we will deconstruct the concept of gamification, illustrate some of the key principles of real world gamification, and look at a few simple examples of how those principles are being applied.

The negative stereotypes about the effects of playing computer or video games are a rich source of material for mass media; we hear less often about the positive aspects of digital game play. In her talk, Regan Mandryk will address five prevalent negative stereotypes, debunking common myths on how playing digital games makes you: 1) fat and lazy, 2) stupid, 3) unable to focus, 4) socially isolated, and 5) emotionally stunted. Drawing from her own research and the research of other academics who study digital games, Dr. Mandryk will leave you itching to go play games so that you can become a smarter, fitter, better-focused individual with a great emotional connection to your circle of friends.