Project IRL:

Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile

Augmented Reality

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Ella Dagan, Ana María Cárdenas Gasca, Ava Robinson,

Anwar Noriega, Yu Jiang Tham, Rajan Vaish,

Andrés Monroy-Hernández

Why is it important to work on co-location?

Motivation

“Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation ... and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.”

Tech disrupting in-person interactions

Opportunity to design for co-location

Turning people’s attention away from their phones...

…and towards each other

“Removed” by Eric Pickersgill

Couple playing with IRL

IRL

Why Augmented Reality?

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👯‍♂️

🏃🏾‍♂

🎠

📼

Social

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Encourage interaction

Playful

Often used to surprise and delight

Embodied

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Engage people’s bodies

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Grounded

Transforms the shared physical world

Memorable

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Easily capture the moment

Five reasons why AR is well-suited to support playful co-located social experiences.

IRL

How can we enhance playful co-located social experiences by using augmented reality?

Research-through-design

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Suite of five mobile apps

IRL

Design framework

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IRL

1. Face It

Follow the instructions, move your head and face, pass one phone around fast!

2. Feeture Films

Collective storytelling with your feet.

3. Treasure Treat

Team up with your dog to get as many treats as you can!

4. Milky Way

Bring your TV alive with an intergalactic Whack-a-Mole

5. Freezing Frenzy

Run around to freeze your opponent, but don’t let them freeze you!

• 101 participants with 10 groups of 2 or 3 users per app

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• Observations & interviews

Study

Results

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Device Arrangement

The Role of Enablers

Affordances of Augmentation

Co-located Play

Device arrangement observations

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Participants physically moved closer & coordinated movements to use the apps.

Face-it! participants mentioned how they had “to sit close to make up the time, because um, the time is only one to two seconds [to pass the phone]”(FI-P19)

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Role of enablers

Using bodies, faces, pets and feet to trigger AR content, encouraged and guided participants to focus on each other, move in synchronicity, and touch or react to each other.

Participants noted Freezing Frenzy got them “moving and interacting with [their] friends”(FRF-P13), and appreciated “that it got [them] up out of [their] chairs”(FRF-P9)

Augmentation affordances

We observed participants being entertained by augmentations, playfully experimenting with the AR and using our prototypes in unexpected ways.

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Participants explored adding their own finger characters to Feeture Films “I added my little finger guy int here and tickled him a little”(FF-P3)

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Co-located play

Participants discussed how having the apps on their phones makes it easy to initiate the interaction and motivates them to engage with others, making “screen time” social.

A Feeture Films participant mentioned “it’s not like watching a TV show where it’s totally passive; It’s something you do together. It’s like a good five-minute activity for you and your kid” (FF-P3)

“there’s an ease to it where you don’t need a lot. You don’t have to go pick a book off your bookshelf” (FF-P5)

How can others design AR experiences to support co-location?

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Design Guidelines

Design guides for co-located AR

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Encourage touch through proxemics. Create a digital experience that gets people close enough to one another that they can touch.

TOUCH

Nudge person-to-person communication via coordination. Create playful scenarios that require people to share information.

COORDINATION

IRL

Design guides for co-located AR

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Focus the augmentation on bodies. Steer people’s attention towards one another by using their faces, feet, arms, and full bodies as enablers.

EMBODIMENT

Build on familiar play. Draw inspiration from game experiences that people might already be familiar with in the analog world, e.g., board-games, and toys.

FAMILIARITY

IRL

Try out our lenses!

letsplayirl.com

Thank you!