Project IRL:
Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile
Augmented Reality
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?
🌲
👯♂️
🏃🏾♂
🎠
📼
Social
Encourage interaction
Playful
Often used to surprise and delight
Embodied
Engage people’s bodies
Grounded
Transforms the shared physical world
Memorable
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
Suite of five mobile apps
IRL
Design framework
8
| Face It | Feeture Films | Treasure Treat | Freezing Frenzy | Milky Way |
Design Attributes | | | | | |
Device Arrangement | One phone | One phone | One phone | Two phones, one TV or laptop | Two phones, one TV or laptop |
Enabler | Face 🙍♀️ | Feet🦶 | Dog 🐶 | Video on TV 📺 | Video on TV 📺 |
Augmentation | Face filters (i.e., "lenses") | Sock puppets | Dog’s silhouette and environment coins | 3D planet | 3D planet |
Interaction Type | Competition | Storytelling | Cooperative Game | Competition | Competition |
Physical Movement | Gesturing with face; passing an object | Gesturing with feet | Gesturing to the dog; dog moving around | Swiveling around the screen | Swiveling around the screen |
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!
Study
Results
15
Device Arrangement
The Role of Enablers
Affordances of Augmentation
Co-located Play
Device arrangement observations
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)
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.
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)
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?
Design Guidelines
Design guides for co-located AR
21
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
22
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!