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Augmented Reality and Games

Introduction

Through their unique combination of visual, narrative, auditory, and interactive elements, video games provide an engaging medium of expression within our society. The proliferation of mobile devices that combine computation and graphics processing with video and GPS sensors holds great potential to enhance gaming. Furthermore, Augmented Reality (AR) holds unique and promising potential to bridge between real-world activities and digital experiences, allowing users to engage their imagination and boost their creativity. Location-aware AR applications extend past our televisions, weaving the magic of gameplay into cultural locations such as the cities in which we live. In this way, games become an augmented version of real settings, bridging between imaginative worlds and the reality around us.

Topics

Augmented Creativity

We propose the concept of Augmented Creativity as employing Augmented Reality on modern mobile devices to enhance real-world creative activities, support education, and open new interaction possibilities. We present nine prototype applications in the domains of seeing, hearing, strategizing, exploring, imagining, and learning, that explore and develop Augmented Creativity in different ways, cultivating creativity through AR interactivity.


Computer-Assisted Story Authoring

The creation of non-linear and interactive stories can be a complex, expensive and error prone task. Our aim is to leverage computer-assistance to support the creation of story worlds as well as interactive stories that happen within those story worlds. Computer assistance is enabled through specification of story domain knowledge, which encodes the semantics of the story world and enables the computer to reason about it.


City-Wide AR Gaming

We explore location-based game concepts that encourage real-world interactions and gamify daily commuting activities. Augmented Reality (AR) holds the potential to provide a novel interaction at city-wide scales. By overlaying interactive elements on top of the rich existing structure of buildings, parks, and roads, novel virtual environments and innovative experiences can be created. In our immersive, pervasive AR trading game called Gnome Trader the player engages with the game by physically traveling to predefined locations in the city and trading resources with virtual gnomes. Our city-wide treasure hunting framework aids developers building city-wide AR scavenger hunt games.


HeapCraft

HeapCraft is an open-source suite of interactive data exploration and visualization tools that allow researchers, server administrators, and game designers to analyze and potentially influence player behavior in Minecraft. Our framework includes a telemetry system, several tools for visualizing and representing the collected data, and tools for modifying the game experience in controlled ways.

Publications





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