Is the system you’re making augmenting reality or occluding reality?
Haptimap and Charlotte Magnusson
These are notes from a panel I was on with Charlotte at Sony Ericsson campus in Lund, Sweden.
“Very often, when you’re designing things, you’re thinking about the typical user. The typical user may have good visual ability, good hearing, no cognitive problems, good motor and tactile ability”, says Magnusson.
“The problem is that a lot of people think about the typical mobile context, where everything works, instead of the contexts in which all of the sudden things no longer work. Everyday circumstances can result in problems seeing and attending to the screen, noisy shaky environment, you might have gloves, other things held, difficult to touch the device”. If you need very fine motor control environment, you’re probably not very happy if you need certain motion controls. (Back of a car, etc.)
“And if, in addition, we try to do AR — information overlaid by the device easily occludes the real world. Onscreen info vs. what you see, audio/voice vs. what you hear. Touch/vibrations vs. what you feel”.
You may look through the device — but if you’re looking at something through a device the whole time, you’re not really in the environment. You’re using the device as a viewfinder through the environment.
In traditional augmented reality, there is a lot of emphasis on the visual channel. One thing that is missing is emotion and physicality.
But in reality there are directions, areas, points, distances. Designers need to learn to design multi-modally for people, contexts and situations.
Examples
Piano Stairs (good template video) – Stockholm, Sweden. — 66% more people chose the stairs than the escalator. Fun can obviously change behavior for the better.
Inception the app – Martin Roth, RJDJ, AndroidOnly! Malmö, 2011″.
Archeology of Time Machine
An Audio-Geiger counter, because as you use it, it sounds like a Geiger counter. You get a very dull sound when pointing in the wrong direction, and very bright sound when pointing in the right direction.
Audio augmented reality – a sound window in time – Activity Sounds, Carriages, Focus.
Sound AR (bubbles) less sensitive to jitter/impressions.
Using this sound to listen to events in the city in the past, i.e. listening to horses and not looking at a screen while you walk down the street.
Virtual Excavator Project
Go to a site and get pictures and sounds of the past based on your location. (cool!)
Showed a video of a lot of people in a field looking around with headphones getting the past audio-ed to him.
Animal hunt — audio-based for kids. Animals have been taken. Difficult DoFi http://www.do-fi.se/site/ — a small company in Malmö — they are doing this in collaboration with them.
Results
Fun! Actor design important (great actor voices and people going around the area with them — a sentry or a baker, etc. that children with headphones walk around a site and visit with them), free exploration — provides one with a feel for spatial locations, screen info problematic in sunny and windy conditions, size of sound bubbles important.
