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The advent of Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides geometry data that can be easily used for visualisations. We present six demonstrators made from the same data using similar workflows. They cover different categories of mobile devices, ranging from head-mounted displays to smartphones and tablets with inside-out positional tracking. They showcase cross-media visualisations depending on the device capabilities, which vary from a sophisticated car-based AR-setup, over wired and wireless VR, to see-through AR on smart glasses, and video-based AR on tablets.

This paper reports on a study of AREEF, a multi-player Underwater Augmented Reality (UWAR) experience for swimming pools. Using off-the-shelf components combined with a custom made waterproof case and an innovative game concept, AREEF puts computer game technology to use for recreational and educational purposes in and under water. After an experience overview, we present evidence gained from a user-centred design-process including a pilot study with 3 kids and a final evaluation with 36 kids. Our discussion covers technical findings regarding marker placement, tracking, and device handling, as well as design related issues like virtual object placement and the need for extremely obvious user interaction and feedback when staging a mobile underwater experience.

Touring location-based experiences is challenging, as both content and underlying location services must be adapted to each new setting. A study of a touring performance called Rider Spoke as it visited three different cities reveals how professional artists developed a novel approach to these challenges in which users drove the co-evolution of content and the underlying location service as they explored each new city. We show how the artists iteratively developed filtering, survey, visualization, and simulation tools and processes to enable them to tune the experience to the local characteristics of each city. Our study reveals how by paying attention to both content and infrastructure issues in tandem, the artists were able to create a powerful user experience that has since toured to many different cities.

The Smartphone Project (TSP) is an interactive dance-performance in a professional setting that exploits the communication channels provided by smartphone-apps as a new material in the dance-theatre domain. We present an account of the experience and its staging. Based on an initial study with 36 participants from the audience, we present results and discuss lessons learned from this project that might guide similar future work.

This paper presents a suite for configuring and deploying mobile, location-based educational games for natural history museums. We propose a novel approach that uses structured museum-data as game-content and present an initial study thereof. The overall aim is to enable domain-experts, like teachers or museum educators, to create educational games for off-the-shelf mobile phones without requiring neither bespoke programming skills nor expensive setups. Our approach builds on the combination of two strands of work: 1.) structuring and providing museum-assets as linked data, and 2.) template-based content creation for mobiles games. This is thought to facilitate reuse of existing data and foster its maintenance on the one hand, as well as providing a timely and engaging mobile interface to museum content on the other hand. Our study is based on two rounds of user-tests with think-aloud observations and questionnaires, and on the developers' notes and reflections that stem from introductory workshops at four natural history museums from the Natural Europe project consortium. We found that both, the workflow for content-creation and the mobile end-user app have high hedonic as well as pragmatic qualities. Thus, the test results indicate that our approach might provide guidance for future work in this domain.

This paper presents a user-study of the TOTEM.Scout mobile tool that has been developed for in-situ creation of location-based content for games and edutainment applications based on configurable data templates. It works in cooperation with the TOTEM.Designer web-based tool and enables convenient structuring, management and export of the created content to prepare arbitrary location-based experiences. We motivate the necessity of this tool as well as its architecture, and describe the layout, results and findings of the performed case study in a real context of use. The results provide insights into possible improvements in terms of user interface and the tool's functionality design, and suggest new features for data collection and management.

This paper reports on AREEF, the world's first multi-player Under Water Augmented Reality (UWAR) experience. The underlying mission of this work was to bring computer games and entertainment applications from traditional settings into the water using Augmented Reality (AR) technology. We provide an application overview and present findings from our participatory design process that involved engineers and designers, as wells as end-users and water-park experts. The paper closes with a brief discussion of technical aspects that relate to Wi-Fi communication and computer vision tracking, and provides an outlook for future work.

Part 18: Mobile Gaming, Mobile Life - Interweaving the Virtual and the Real; International audience; Over the last few years we have witnessed the smartphone dominating the market, the rapid growth of mobile apps, a surge in mobile augmented reality and location-based apps, and burgeoning mobile communities. While mobile topics continue to provide rich research challenges, people and companies outside academia already use these apps regularly. This is due to the increased availability of affordable devices, applications and technologies that support the creation of mixed reality experiences. Thus a core theme of our workshop at ICEC 2012 is authoring mixed realities, designing mobile games and creating mobile experiences. We would like to assess how professional designers and developers, as well as academics and end users, are using the technology to connect the digital and the real in a mobile context.

Designing Augmented Reality location aware games requires an understanding of how form and content issues impact on presence. A study of 60 players was conducted using questionnaires, video analysis and interviews. The results indicate that content including: moral dilemmas, strong narratives, using real locations effectively and applying simple physical behavior within virtual characters to improve embodiment have a positive impact on player experience. The results are presented in the form of guidelines.

This paper presents the location-based game Tidy City and the accompanying authoring tools that enable users to create new scavenger hunt like missions. In the game the players need to physically explore their city by interpreting clues to find the correct target destination. The in-situ authoring tool Tidy City Scout enables designers to likewise walk around the city and collecting notes, images and GPS data for potential riddles. The riddles are finalized in a web-based authoring tool and then published to all players of the game. The game and its tools are freely accessible for non-commercial purposes at http://totem.fit.fraunhofer.de/tidycity.

Presence is usually assessed via a variety of subjective and objective measures. However, constraints often result in subjective measurements using questionnaires as a key method of data collection. In this paper we present a study of 44 participants of a collaborative augmented reality game known as TimeWarp which used both subjective and objective behavioral measures. Behavior as coded from video recordings of one scene of the game and self-reports about feelings of presence were compared. Our findings indicate that pointing behavior and verbal responses to the virtual content are correlated negatively to sense of presence. We further investigated the influence of subjectively perceived interactivity on perceived presence. We found that the interaction possibilities perceived by the participants predicted their experience of social presence with the virtual characters in the game. Furthermore, playing together with another person did not result in decreased social pre sence of the virtual characters. Implications for presence research are discussed.

Touring location-based experiences is challenging as both content and underlying location-services must be adapted to each new setting. A study of a touring performance called Rider Spoke as it visited three different cities reveals how professional artists developed a novel approach to these challenges in which users drove the co-evolution of content and the underlying location-service as they explored each new city. We show how the artists iteratively developed filtering, survey, visualization and simulation tools and processes to enable them to tune the experience to the local characteristics of each city. Our study reveals how by paying attention to both content and infrastructure issues in tandem the artists were able to create a powerful user experience that has since toured to many different cities.

In the gaming area, augmented reality (AR) and especially mobile augmented reality provides unique opportunities. Unlike traditional video games, mobile augmented reality games are not imprisoned in the screen-space but provide for interaction with the world that surrounds us. They incorporate real locations and objects into the game, therefore tapping into a set of pre-existing thoughts, emotions and real-life experiences of its players, which in turn provides the material for a much richer gaming world and user experience. In mobile augmented reality games the playing area becomes borderless and they can be played literally anywhere and anytime. The current advancement of modern cell phone technology is finally giving more people than ever the hardware necessary to participate and experience such games.

This chapter (Boyd Davis principal author, project director) discusses issues arising from the development of a world-first location-aware game (’Ere be Dragons) using live bio-sensing, funded by the Wellcome Trust and supported by Hewlett Packard Research, who created the entirely new combinations of technology used for the project. The chapter contributes to the understanding of ‘serious games’, a field traceable to George Mallen’s 1968 Eco Game but increasingly significant in the past decade. The project used imagery and animation to represent combined data gathered from two live streams, location and heart-rate, exploring the new possibilities of media that are pervasive, multimodal and physical. It previously received international attention and awards reported in RAE2008; the new contribution here was to identify the relevance for medical information technology. This invited chapter was the only one in the book not written by medical experts. The research programme required a cross-disciplinary team of artists, interaction experts and health scientists, using art to explore bioscience in the context of public health; the science collaborator was Professor Riddoch, Senior Scientific Editor, Chief Medical Officer's report, Physical Activity and Health (2004). It combined novel mobile technologies with novel gameplay, unlike most digital games, which are reactionary and unimaginative in their models of play. Finally, formal and informal evaluation was undertaken with users. The chapter focuses on the use of digital gameplay as a means of modifying attitudes and behaviours, and the benefits of live feedback during use as distinct from retrospective review of performance. Two contexts are described: the crisis in health caused by widespread low levels of physical activity and the techno-cultural context in which the work was developed. Few projects have been based on live heart-rate, and the chapter explains the problems and the potential of exploiting this aspect of behaviour in digital play.

In this chapter we provide an overview of the area of mobile location-based gaming and its relation to maps. Digital maps of various forms are essential to enable the implementation of mobile location-based games and support various key tasks from content authoring and interaction scripting over game state management and location-based interaction at run-time, to content presentation and user orientation. Based on an analysis of early experiments and currently existing systems we examine requirements with regards to hardware, software, standards and game design and discuss their implications for future developments.

In current authoring tools for location-aware applications the designer typically places trigger zones onto a map of the target environment and associates these with events and media assets. However, studies of deployed experiences have shown that the characteristics of the usually invisible ubiquitous computing infrastructure, especially limited coverage and accuracy, have a major impact on an experience. We propose a new approach in which designers work with three layers of information: information about the physical world, information about digital media, but also visualizations of ubiquitous infrastructure. We describe the implementation of a prototype authoring tool that embodies this approach and describe how it has been used to author a location-based game for mobile phones called Tycoon. We then outline the key challenges involved in generalizing this approach to more powerful authoring tools including acquiring and visualizing infrastructure data, acquiring map data, and flexibly specifying how digital content relates to both of these.

Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other multimedia sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to a player's movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game server and other players. We review recent examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as multimedia applications. We then consider the challenge of scaling pervasive games to include potentially very large numbers of players. We propose a new approach based upon a campaign model in which individuals, local groups and experts draw on a combination of pervasive games, online services and broadcasting to take part in national or even global events. We discuss the challenges that this raises for further research.

The user interface and its ease of use are seen as a crucial point for the enduring success of almost any application. The creation of effective user interfaces is no simple task, especially within the domain of augmented reality. Many developers still use traditional desktop-interfaces for their AR applications, even if they are not really suitable for the user, simply because the development of a usable 3D interface is much too complicated and thus consuming too much time and money. This paper describes the ARGUI system, which provides developers of ARToolkit applications with the possibility to create 2D interaction-surfaces registered in 3D. With ARGUI 2D interactions on 2D objects registered in 3D are possible, e.g. attached to a marker. The integration of a complete 2D GUI library is shown in detail, which simplifies the creation of the user interface even more.

This paper charts the distinctive challenges of designing mobile experiences for cyclists and presents two studies of mobile cycle-based experiences: one a heritage tour; the other an exploration of a city at dusk involving recording and listening to personal stories. To understand the cyclists' experiences questionnaires, interviews and observations are drawn on to derive eight lessons for designing cycle-based interaction including: cycling proficiency, physicality, impact of the environment, media and hardware design, collaboration, and safety. The conclusion is that design has to respect the distinctive nature of cycling as a mode of transport and needs to carefully interweave moments of interaction with it.