Augmented Reality

The OAR Platform for building AR games

At MIT, a PocketPC based platform has been made to author AR games. They use the terms light AR and heavy AR defining how much R is really added. For example, heavy AR involves a complete replacement of reality whereas light AR augments in smaller ways. Our ARIS project is defiantly trying to reuse as much of the physical world as possible.

The OAR platform is much for science process oriented than ARIS

Kurt Squire’s reflections on Mobile Media

Existing portable devices: clickers, ar, etc.
Not very good computers: small screen, input sux, poor storage
Mobile media does some things well: portable, social, context
Approaching Ubiquity : They are becoming more common

Emerging Mobile Practices: Cocooning, GeoCaching, Flash Mobs, Citizen Journalism, Unsanctioned Info, Co presence like Daily Cos

Remediating of Place: Augmented, Leveraging Space, Students as Artifics

Like it or not, Kids are going to be online. (What are we going to do?)

Principles:

• Collective Intelligence
• Designing a new solution FOR REAL. example: saving lake wingra. The students go a play a game about the green bush neighborhood, have a class time to redevelop a new city development plan, then had a resolution passed to have “green bush” day to tell the story of what happened there.

Reflection: Heck yeah. lets be designing our games to enable folks to change their world. Where do we start?

The Zoo Game in the OAR engine

Tensions: looking down at computer screen vs the roaring lion, not much time (in school), filed trips=day off mentality, need chaperones, better if free standing without prep/followup.

Prototype 1: Too much text (ESL students) , Too Many decision (cognitive load), Only one player has info

Prototype 2: Tutorial needed to be smoother

Comment: Mobile Documentation – Group in Amazon documented , NPR maps- like activity to understand space.

Madison AR Games

As high tech as things get, you are still sitting in front of a computer. Outside is a great place to create stories. You know, the place where our bodies actually are. Many of the games that have come out of the local games lab have been outside in the wild.

Game Design Ideas

Big Games and Our Games

Patrick Lipo – Hidden Path Development

• Fear of player expectations
• Resources have no meaning
• ‘Stuff’ adds value
• Open world insanity (GTA is like $100M) Breadth in every direction.

So you need to know your “verbs”, “secondary verbs”, and “pillar values”

For example, primary verb is solving puzzles, secondary is managing money. Value placed on lightweight narrative structure to unlock puzzles.

I know he is saying that educational games are tempted to shove content into existing structures, but the example that you can never have the player solve a diff eq to continue is shortsighted. Its all about integration. If the player is doing engineering, the pencil/paper activity is completely in genre!

Interesting scope problem: Vegas. Players are thinking ‘per-room,’ clearing room after room, but then all of a sudden, one random character was not just part of the crowd. It caused the player to start thinking ‘per individual’ and didn’t work.

The big question is: What are the players going to take away after playing?

I’m curious how we can move our cryo design from the regular math gate into the building of an analysis tool based on experimentation – Modding the game (like Jim G talked about)

From Pure entertainment to Playful Learning

UBISOFT – Games for Everyone – Emile LIANG, Peter YANG

Three types of behaviors for our games:

• Have to learn
• Want to learn
• Enjoy Learning

Casual Gaming

Good: expanding the media horizon, challenges industry to think about what people really want, not dumbing everything down

Bad: no consensus, new goldrush so everyone is building and the quality is dropping (that doesn’t make sense to me, more developers is better in my mind. this is how we learn what quality is!)

Misconceptions: casual gaming is for girls, isn’t fun

Creating tension: “You don’t need the sound of chainsaws in the background” but instead give challenge while providing feedback on success for progression and achievement.

Tips:

• NAVER assume you know your audience
• People are not always looking for a ferarri
• Being assessable doesn’t mean treating your audience like a dummy.
• PLAYTEST PLAYTEST PLAYTEST

Games for Science

Tiger Sharks and 3d minigames

You have to love Dan, Dan and Alex of Filament Games In their demo of Uncharted Depths they are showing a bit of the scientific reasoning process that goes into understanding population densities of different animals. 

Field experiments are performed and sharks are collected, then you check out the contents of their stomaches and find out of if they are really eating all the baby seals. This data is stored like an inventory item and these are used to make a scientific argument (like Phoenix Wright). 

he complexity of these questions builds up to the final question: How to solve the problem of shark overpopulation. The model is tight, experiments and arguments, repeat. Though I would hate to see zero punctuation take a crack at it, this is one of the best examples of educational gaming I’ve seen to date.

I’m personally challenged on how my designs can integrate this notion of building a theory.

The space of education is changing

C. Ondrejka

Things are getting smaller faster better in every way. There are some trends that are a bit intersting:

• People are wearing tech
• The web is getting better (despite identit, offline access)
• Everything is connecting to PLACE

 What else can we collect to make data more interesting? Emotion…

For virtual worlds, its all about browsers and portable devices.

What do we use them for?

• Presence – Where are you, are you moving, etc
• Life Logging – Its comming! Should the default be to stream everything?
• How do we wanange multiple identities (second life, second life work, personal, etc)

But interfaces are the same! Mouse plus keyboard

There are a lot of things converging, should it be a feild? 

• Establish common vocab
• Preserve knowledge
• etc.

This whole thing is really encouraging. I’m seeing someone tell me that our work to utilize the portable devices is indeed interesting. Will ARIS be the gateway into this new field for our team? 

The Halversons

Redefinition of GLS society into participatory media experiences. 

Fan practice tries to retrace the primary activities (for example a baseball player trade), but fantasy games feed this back. This model of previous knowledge and reinterpreted primary actions combining into fantasy play can be reused for any data rich environment.

Mr Jim Gee

Linguistics, Education, Video Games.

We need to make a choice about paradigms. Many complex systems are interacting and biting us in the butt. We are on the cusp of this stuff being unsolvable (see book: plan b). Food, water, oil, etc, they are all interconnected.

21st century skills are all about thinking about complex systems.

Passion communities:

• recruit
• manage
• find solutions

The passion communities with (amateur knowledge) often come up with better solutions! So why are we leaving the hard stuff to politicians? There are passion communities around everything (sims, modding wow, etc) and have/create experts in that field who are very unlikely. Ex: the failure girl who learns photoshop at an expert level to design clothes for the sims and has 400 people downloading her designs.)

These people are PROSUMERS

Producing, but not for money. They get social status, control, fun

 Same girl, still no good at school, now moved into second life. When interviewed, she doesn’t want to be a fashion designer. She wants to work with computers because they give you power.

The future of education is not to design games, but game like systems. 

Let’s talk about Portal. The whole game has you running around in a bunch of labs using the portal gun, but the last phase puts you in a real world, with sno suggestions. You have to transfer to succeeded. The game wants to give you a tool that let’s you see the world in a new way. It let’s you see the (my word) AFFORDANCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM.

Empathy for a complex system.

Example: Modding – Experts theorizing their play and building a tool to support that theory. Better than the designers!

Portable Augmented Reality

I am not alone in the dream to see portable internet connected devices change the way we interact with our world. This is a fantastic example of some folks who have brought strong AR to a smaller screen.