Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is associated with declines in memory and executive function, which can reduce opportunities for meaningful social interaction, a critical component of well-being in older adulthood. Digital games show promise for fostering connection among older adults with MCI, but evaluating the quality of these interactions, particularly in remote contexts, remains a challenge. We conducted a study where dyads of older adults, with and without MCI, played familiar games both in-person and remotely using the video chat platform OneClick.chat. To assess their shared experience, we developed the Copresence, Social Interaction, and Engagement (CPSIE) scale, a 20-item self-report measure designed to capture core aspects of social gameplay. Using the CPSIE, we compared experiences between an initial and redesigned version of Connect 4. Results showed that the redesigned game improved co-presence and engagement scores in remote play, effectively eliminating the prior gap between remote and in-person conditions. This work introduces a novel instrument for evaluating social connectedness in digital games and provides design insights for creating more meaningful, engaging virtual play experiences for older adults.

The studio proposed here will focus on design and accessibility considerations for wearable technology. In this studio we will explore how to develop a robust set of design and accessibility considerations (guidelines) for wearable technology. The course will begin a presentation on wearability and accessibility then participants will engage in an activity using a new Wearable Technology Designer’s Web Tool. The tool can be accessed again after the course and shared with students and colleagues. The course will end with a discussion about what design considerations might need to be added to the tool and what human factors information or other research should be updated.

Working or WERKing on a wearable technology project in a transdisciplinary group can be an effective way of learning new skills and collaboration techniques. This paper describes a case study of running a wearable technology group project within an undergraduate course entitled Wearable Technology and Society. The computational media students in the class collaborated with outside performance artists (drag queens and a street dancer) to create interactive performance garments. Design methods such as the use of boundary objects aided in communication of ideas and cooperation across disciplines and cultural barriers. The requirement that the interactive garment function appropriately in a real performance lent urgency and gravity to the experience, motivating cohesive and expedited problem solving in the transdisciplinary group. The use of these methods on a project with real world outcomes and consequences facilitated an authentic learning experience for the students involved.

Video games have great value for collecting rich data that can be used to study fundamental research questions in fields such as psychology and human-computer interaction. There is an increased use of games as scientific tools to assess and train the cognitive, as well as non-cognitive traits and abilities of players. However, games designed as research tools have a unique and challenging set of considerations so that they meet both the requirements of a scientific protocol, while also maintaining an acceptable gaming experience. Additionally, the success of a research game requires extensive planning and co-creation support for trans-disciplinary teams. This paper describes five critical considerations for the design and implementation of custom-built games as scientifically valid and reliable experimental test beds. These findings resulted from several years of work creating game artifacts to study cognitive training and assessment of individual differences. This class of games presents unique design challenges that are often at odds with traditional game design conventions. However, there are many promising applications and use cases for thoughtfully instrumented games that are capable of generating data with comparable accuracy to traditional and previously validated measures.

Working on a wearable technology interdisciplinary project team can be challenging because of a lack of shared understanding between different fields, and a lack of ability in cross-disciplinary communication. We describe an interdisciplinary collaborative design process used for creating a wearable musical instrument with a musician. Our diverse team used drawing and example artifacts/toolkits to overcome communication and gaps in knowledge. We view this process in the frame of Susan Leigh Star's description of a boundary object, and against a similar process used in another musical / computer science collaboration with the group Duran Duran.

The articles in this special section were presented at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).

The Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART) was an augmented (AR) and mixed reality (MR) authoring tool targeted at new media designers. It was released in 2003 and was heavily used by a diverse population of creators for the next several years [28]. Ten years later, we approached a group of users to collect reflections on their use of DART, the artifacts they produced, their subsequent AR/MR authoring, their thoughts on the challenges of AR/MR authoring in general, and the state of modern tools. In this paper we present the findings from in-depth interviews with these DART developers and other AR experts. Their reflections provide insights on how to successfully engage non-technologists with new media and the challenges they face during authoring, the unique requirements of new media authoring, and how modern tools are still not meeting the needs of this type of author, highlighting where additional research is needed.

We are delighted to welcome you to ISMAR 2013, the 12th symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality! This year's symposium continues a long tradition of ISMAR meetings, a series that itself followed a related series of IWAR, ISMR, and ISAR meetings.

In this poster, we examine gender differences in older adults playing an off-the-shelf puzzle game (Boom Blox, EA 2008). Game design research for the elderly is an under-developed area, even though one-fifth of adults over the age of sixty-five reported playing video games and those that do so play more often that their younger counterparts. Gender differences in older adult gamers are even less understood. We use quantitative and qualitative techniques to identify gender differences in older adult game players and we discuss ramifications for cognitive game design.

In this poster, we present the idea of “virtual transparency” for video see-through AR. In fully synthetic 3D graphics, head-tracked motion parallax has been shown to be a powerful depth cue for understanding the structure of the virtual world. To leverage head-tracked motion parallax in video see-through AR, the view of the virtual and physical world must change together in response to head motion. We present a system for accomplishing this, and discuss the benefits and limitations of our approach.

A common vision of Augmented Reality (AR) is that of a person immersed in a diverse collection of virtual information, superimposed on their view of the world around them. If such a vision is to become reality, an ecosystem for AR must be created that satisfies at least these properties: multiple sources (or channels of interactive information) must be able to be simultaneously displayed and interacted with, channels must be isolated from each other (for security and stability), channel authors must have the flexibility to design the content and interactivity of their channel, and the application must fluidly integrate with the ever-growing cloud of systems and services that define our digital lives. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Argon AR Web Browser and describe our vision of an AR application environment that leverages the WWW ecosystem. We also describe KARML, our extension to KML (the spatial markup language for Google Earth and Maps), that supports the functionality required for mobile AR. We combine KARML with the full range of standard web technologies to create a standards-based web browser for mobile AR. KARML lets users develop 2D and 3D content using existing web technologies and facilitates easy deployment from standard web servers. We highlight a number of projects that have used Argon and point out the ways in which our web-based architecture has made previously impractical AR concepts possible.

This paper discusses an experiment carried out in an AR test bed called “the pit”. Inspired by the well-known VR acrophobia study of Meehan et al. [18], the experimental goals were to explore whether VR presence instruments were useful in AR (and to modify them where appropriate), to compare additional measures to these well-researched techniques, and to determine if findings from VR evaluations can be transferred to AR. An experimental protocol appropriate for AR was developed. The initial experimental findings concern varying immersion factors (frame rate) and their effect on feelings of presence, user performance and behavior. Unlike the VR study, which found differing frame rates to affect presence measures, there were few differences in the five frame rate modes in our study as measured by the qualitative and quantitative instruments, which included physiological responses, a custom presence questionnaire, task performance, and user behavior. The AR presence questionnaire indicated users experienced a high feeling of presence in all frame rate modes. Behavior, performance, and interview results indicated the participants felt anxiety in the pit environment. However, the physiological data did not reflect this anxiety due to factors of user experience and experiment design. Efforts to develop a useful AR test bed and to identify results from a large data set has produced a body of knowledge related to AR evaluation that can inform others seeking to create AR experiments.

Widespread future adoption of augmented reality technology will rely on a broadly accessible standard for authoring and distributing content with, at a minimum, the flexibility and interactivity provided by current web authoring technologies. We introduce KHARMA, an open architecture based on KML for geospatial and relative referencing combined with HTML, JavaScript and CSS technologies for content development and delivery. This architecture uses lightweight representations that decouple infrastructure and tracking sources from authoring and content delivery. Our main contribution is a re-conceptualization of KML that turns HTML content formerly confined to balloons into first-class elements in the scene. We introduce the KARML extension that gives authors increase control over the presentation of HTML content and its spatial relationship to other content.

We present a concept for augmented reality entertainment, called AR Karaoke, where users perform their favorite dramatic scenes with virtual actors. AR Karaoke is the acting equivalent of traditional Karaoke, where the goal is to facilitate an acting experience for the user that is entertaining for both the user and audience. Prototype implementations were created to evaluate various user interfaces and design approach reveal guidelines that are relevant to the design of mixed reality applications in the domains of gaming, performance, and entertainment.

In this paper [MacIntyre et al 2004]. we describe The Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART). DART is built on top of Macromedia Director, a widely used multimedia development environment. We summarize the most significant problems faced by designers working with AR in the real world, and discuss how DART addresses them. Most of DART is implemented in an interpreted scripting language, and can be modified by designers to suit their needs. Our work focuses on supporting early design activities, especially a rapid transition from storyboards to working experience, so that the experiential part of a design can be tested early and often. DART allows designers to specify complex relationships between the physical and virtual worlds, and supports 3D animatic actors (informal, sketch-based content) in addition to more polished content. Designers can capture and replay synchronized video and sensor data, allowing them to work off-site and to test specific parts of their experience more effectively.

In this paper we present an approach for exposing tracking technology in an accessible and flexible way to users of a rapid prototyping system for mixed (MR) and augmented reality (AR). Our system provides a tracking framework that alleviates the need for a high level of expertise while also presenting a model of the technology that allows for flexible modification of tracking configurations, the ability to quickly change an application from one type of tracking technology to another, and the creation of synthetic trackers for playback of prerecorded data, data fusion from multiple trackers, and wizard-of-oz applications.

In this paper, we describe The Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART). DART is built on top of Macromedia Director, a widely used multimedia development environment. We summarize the most significant problems faced by designers working with AR in the real world, and discuss how DART addresses them. Most of DART is implemented in an interpreted scripting language, and can be modified by designers to suit their needs. Our work focuses on supporting early design activities, especially a rapid transition from story-boards to working experience, so that the experiential part of a design can be tested early and often. DART allows designers to specify complex relationships between the physical and virtual worlds, and supports 3D animatic actors (informal, sketch-based content) in addition to more polished content. Designers can capture and replay synchronized video and sensor data, allowing them to work off-site and to test specific parts of their experience more effectively.

This demonstration highlights the Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART), a system that allows users to easily create augmented reality (AR) experiences. Over the past year our research has focused on the creation of this toolkit that can be used by technologists, designers, and students alike to rapidly prototype AR applications. Current approaches to AR development involve extensive programming and content creation as well as knowledge of technical topics involving cameras, trackers, and 3D geometry. The result is that it is very difficult even for technologists to create AR experiences. Our goal was to eliminate these obstacles that prevent such users from being able to experiment with AR. The DART system is based on the Macromedia Director multimedia-programming environment, the de facto standard for multimedia content creation. DART uses the familiar Director paradigms of a score, sprites and behaviors to allow a user to visually create complex AR applications. DART also provides low-level support for the management of trackers, sensors, and camera via a Director plug-in Xtra. This demonstration will show the wide range of AR and other types of multimedia applications that can be created with DART, and visitors will have the opportunity to use DART to create their own experiences.