Here is a listing of all the papers submitted for our workshop, along with their abstracts and authors.
For downloading convenience, we’ve compiled all the papers into one handy bundle. We’ve included the paper that we organizers put together to initiate the workshop as a “background” and motivation paper for us all to consider as we network and consider future collaborative efforts.
Download Our Workshop Papers’ Bundle
Workshop Motivation and Goals
Mixed Reality Games
Hansen, Toups, Nacke, Salter, Lutters, BonsignoreCollaborative technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives. Mixed reality games use these technologies to entertain, motivate, educate, and inspire. We understand mixed reality games as goal-directed, structured play experiences that are not fully contained by virtual or physical worlds. They transform existing technologies, relationships, and places into a platform for gameplay. While the design of mixed reality games and interactive entertainments have received increasing attention across multiple disciplines, a focus on the collaborative potential of mixed reality formats, such as augmented and alternate reality games, has been lacking. We believe the CSCW community can play an essential and unique role in examining and designing the next generation of mixed reality games and technologies that support them. To this end, we seek to bring together researchers, designers, and players to advance an integrated mixed reality games’ research canon and outline key opportunities and challenges for future research and development.
Paper | Presenting: all
Workshop Papers
Low Fidelity Prototyping for Social, Location-based Game Apps
Bowser, Hansen, Rotman, Preece
The widespread use of geographically-aware mobile devices is prompting a surge in social, location-based games and apps ranging from Geocaching to urban street games. Prototyping such games presents many unique challenges including the need to represent time, space, and social experiences. We review these challenges and discuss low-fidelity prototyping techniques that can assist in designing these games.
Paper | Presenting: Anne Bowser, Derek Hansen
Playing with mobile augmented reality for fostering informal learning
Divitini, Mora, Boron, PanneseOur contribution is based on our experience with crisis management and the development of CroMAR, a mobile augmented reality system for supporting reflective learning. The system is intended to promote reflection after an event has taken place and support learning. After a first evaluation of the system, we think there is a potential to extend it as a game to promote learning also among people who have not been involved in the event. In the workshop we are interested in discussing challenges connected to the development of augmented reality games aiming at supporting situated reflective learning.
Paper | Presenting: Ines di Loreto
Serious Mixed Reality Games
Fischer, Flintham, Price, Goulding, Pantidi, Rodden
We argue for serious mixed reality games as an approach to study and design for challenging real-word scenarios, such as disaster response, for which empirical data is difficult to obtain and efficacy of purely computational simulations is questionable. We outline our approach and give an example of a serious mixed reality game, which allows the study and analysis of human-agent interaction in a disaster response scenario on the ground.
Paper | Presenting: Joel E. Fischer
Challenges of Mobile Phone-based, GPS-Dependent Gaming for Citizen Science
Graham, Vassallo, Gerrick, Han, Kang, Hsieh
Citizen Science (CS) projects involve the public in data collection for a range of goals, from scientific to social health. Context aware gaming, where location-based information is used to inform gaming elements, can be leveraged to engage players in CS activities, attract new players, and act as quality assurance for data collected. Here we describe the challenges faced during development of the mobile phone-based CS game of Floracaching that uses the GPS sensor to grant players access to gaining points based on their physical location. Problems with the accuracy of GPS have been demonstrated to reduce player confidence in the functionality of the game and have led to abandonment of further play and data collection. We introduce a method for manually overcoming the GPS-based location inaccuracy in urban environments and evaluated its effectiveness on a university campus.
Paper | Presenting: Eric A. Graham
Augmented and Alternate Reality Game Design Patterns
Murray, Garbe
The realm of alternate reality games is young, cutting-edge, with forms as varied and divergent as the evolving technologies that birth them. One of the distinguishing characteristics of augmented reality as a technology is the ability to register virtual objects, concepts and information onto the natural world. It is not limited to images overlaid onto a persons vision, but can also include any delivered information that aligns with their current reality, such as audio narration that takes into account their view and any occlusions, or the representation of the physical position of entities—either real or virtual—in relation to their own. This paper describes the spectrum of current augmentation as well as design patterns for collaborative experiences within them, ranging from the complete replacement of place and entities with those that exist only inside a computer to those that exist completely in the mind of the players.
Paper | Presenting: John Murray, Jacob Garbe
Fitness and Competition in Mixed Reality Games
Nacke, HogueMixed reality (MR) games present a way to bridge the physical and digital world by combining in-game views of a digital game world with views of and interfaces to the real world. Our research uses mixed and augmented reality techniques to investigate MR games that (1) provide greater freedom of movement and encourage healthy group exercise while playing and that (2) integrate physical collaboration with digital gameplay. Using two example student game projects, we will discuss how these gaming techniques tie together HCI and game research concepts.
Paper | Presenting: Lennart Nacke
Designing Mixed Reality Games to Study Culture, Family Practices, and Social Engagement
Neustaedter, Moulder, Wakkary, Judge, TangOur research focuses on the design and study of pervasive and location-based games that explore cultural practices, social engagement, community, family values, and the documentation and understanding of place. We believe such mixed reality games present a unique opportunity for engaging community participants in the documentation and sharing of their experiences relating to their surroundings, community, and lifestyle.
We are also interested in the notion of ‘scalable’ pervasive games. Many pervasive games are designed in a way that makes them difficult to duplicate in various locations or sustain long-term participation. This makes it challenging to understand the effects of repeated or long-term participation. Our research explores how we can design self-sustaining and scalable pervasive games based on player-generated content.
Paper | Presenting: Carmen Neustaedter
TaleBlazer: designing location-based augmented reality games for education
Rosenheck, SheldonIn this position paper we describe the work the MITSTEP lab has done around location-based augmented reality (LBAR) games for education. We have designed LBAR games to teach science topics and skills, and we have developed a platform to enable students and teachers to design and build their own local LBAR games. As we move on to the next generation of this tool, we lay out a number of questions whose answers will be key to successfully integrating LBAR games into educational experiences.
Paper | Presenting: Louisa Rosenheck
Gameful Learning and Assessment
Salter, BonsignoreWell-designed games provide socially situated contexts that engage players in information evaluation and problem-solving activities. Perhaps more importantly, games offer positive reinforcement and continuous assessment, motivating players to persist through negative experiences (or failure) as they advance through levels of play that rise in difficulty to match their developing skills. In many ways, game structures and mechanics offer models for educators and designers alike to rethink assessment as a continuous and integrated process throughout learning rather than a disconnected, post-activity performance checkpoint. This paper examines the ways in which existing mixed reality games naturally embed opportunities for assessment into their interactions. Our aim is to engender discussion on how we might systematically characterize and extend the assessment in games, and profit from their inherent similarities in formal and informal education environments.
Paper | Presenting: Anastasia Salter, Elizabeth Bonsignore
A Platform for Augmented Alternate Reality Services (fAARS)
Stroulia, Gutiérrez, NikolaidisfAARS is a platform conceived to support the design and deployment of augmented alternate reality applications. Through their mobile devices, users provide information about their current activities in the real world, and access information from parallel alternative words that augment their experience. Users can also experience fAARS applications through any of the alternate virtual worlds, which may reflect the real world in any number of dimensions. To date, we have used fAARS for the development of serious games for education but also for augmenting real-world social events with information about participants and exhibited artifacts.
Paper | Presenting: Eleni Stroulia, Lucio Gutiérrez
Mixed Reality Affords Zero-Fidelity Simulation of Team Coordination
Toups, Hamilton, KerneLocation-aware mixed reality affords opportunities not found in traditional stationary game design: collaborating players may dynamically co-locate. This capability is essential to the team coordination of first responders. To educate first responders in team coordination, we developed the zero-fidelity simulation Team Coordination Game (TeC). The game is zero-fidelity because it does not resemble the firefighting environment, but does capture team coordination. In this paper, we highlight the need, in practice, to support mixing communication modalities of face-to-face and radio, describe our prototype mixed reality TeC, and discuss our use of seamful design with semi-seamless communication.
Paper | Presenting: Zachary Toups, William Hamilton
Trade-Offs for Designing Handheld Augmented Reality Game Interfaces
Xu, Mendenhall, Ha, Radu, MacIntyreReality-based interfaces show great promise to bridge physical-digital divide and to create novel gameplay experiences. But in our own projects designing Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR) games, we have encountered several design challenges that require us to consider the trade-offs introduced by the affordances and constraints of Handheld Augmented Reality interfaces. In this paper we present three of these trade-offs that reflect the gap between designing interfaces for fun and for work.
Paper | Presenting: Yan Xu