Recent combinations of interactive technology, humans, and water have resulted in “WaterHCI”. WaterHCI design seeks to complement the many benefits of engagement with the aquatic domain, by offering, for example, augmented reality systems for snorkelers, virtual reality in floatation tanks, underwater musical instruments for artists, robotic systems for divers, and wearables for swimmers. We conducted a workshop in which WaterHCI experts articulated the field's grand challenges, aiming to contribute towards a systematic WaterHCI research agenda and ultimately advance the field.

While collaboration in shared extended reality spaces has been extensively explored, larger environments like entire floors or buildings have garnered less attention. To address this gap, spatial navigation and collaboration across realities must be made possible so that users can find each other and foster shared spatial understanding independent from reality. Current developments target either navigation or collaboration but lack the combination. In this poster, we present an extended reality remote collaboration system using an augmented reality (AR) based indoor navigation for on-site and a Building Information Model (BIM) of the physical environment Virtual Reality (VR) system for remote users. We conducted a user study with ten participants (five pairs) to gather initial insights into the system’s usability and preferences for collaborative tools. The results offer initial insights into creating shared spatial understanding across realities. Our work contributes to a collaborative XR navigation system for extensive shared spaces.

Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is still a fragmented space to design for due to the rapidly evolving hardware, the interdisciplinarity of teams, and a lack of standards and best practices. We interviewed 26 professional AR/VR designers and developers to shed light on their tasks, approaches, tools, and challenges. Based on their work and the artifacts they generated, we found that AR/VR application creators fulfill four roles: concept developers, interaction designers, content authors, and technical developers. One person often incorporates multiple roles and faces a variety of challenges during the design process from the initial contextual analysis to the deployment. From analysis of their tool sets, methods, and artifacts, we describe critical key challenges. Finally, we discuss the importance of prototyping for the communication in AR/VR development teams and highlight design implications for future tools to create a more usable AR/VR tool chain.

This paper reports on a study of AREEF, a multi-player Underwater Augmented Reality (UWAR) experience for swimming pools. Using off-the-shelf components combined with a custom made waterproof case and an innovative game concept, AREEF puts computer game technology to use for recreational and educational purposes in and under water. After an experience overview, we present evidence gained from a user-centred design-process including a pilot study with 3 kids and a final evaluation with 36 kids. Our discussion covers technical findings regarding marker placement, tracking, and device handling, as well as design related issues like virtual object placement and the need for extremely obvious user interaction and feedback when staging a mobile underwater experience.

The Smartphone Project (TSP) is an interactive dance-performance in a professional setting that exploits the communication channels provided by smartphone-apps as a new material in the dance-theatre domain. We present an account of the experience and its staging. Based on an initial study with 36 participants from the audience, we present results and discuss lessons learned from this project that might guide similar future work.

This paper presents a suite for configuring and deploying mobile, location-based educational games for natural history museums. We propose a novel approach that uses structured museum-data as game-content and present an initial study thereof. The overall aim is to enable domain-experts, like teachers or museum educators, to create educational games for off-the-shelf mobile phones without requiring neither bespoke programming skills nor expensive setups. Our approach builds on the combination of two strands of work: 1.) structuring and providing museum-assets as linked data, and 2.) template-based content creation for mobiles games. This is thought to facilitate reuse of existing data and foster its maintenance on the one hand, as well as providing a timely and engaging mobile interface to museum content on the other hand. Our study is based on two rounds of user-tests with think-aloud observations and questionnaires, and on the developers' notes and reflections that stem from introductory workshops at four natural history museums from the Natural Europe project consortium. We found that both, the workflow for content-creation and the mobile end-user app have high hedonic as well as pragmatic qualities. Thus, the test results indicate that our approach might provide guidance for future work in this domain.

Designing Augmented Reality location aware games requires an understanding of how form and content issues impact on presence. A study of 60 players was conducted using questionnaires, video analysis and interviews. The results indicate that content including: moral dilemmas, strong narratives, using real locations effectively and applying simple physical behavior within virtual characters to improve embodiment have a positive impact on player experience. The results are presented in the form of guidelines.

This paper presents the location-based game Tidy City and the accompanying authoring tools that enable users to create new scavenger hunt like missions. In the game the players need to physically explore their city by interpreting clues to find the correct target destination. The in-situ authoring tool Tidy City Scout enables designers to likewise walk around the city and collecting notes, images and GPS data for potential riddles. The riddles are finalized in a web-based authoring tool and then published to all players of the game. The game and its tools are freely accessible for non-commercial purposes at http://totem.fit.fraunhofer.de/tidycity.

Presence is usually assessed via a variety of subjective and objective measures. However, constraints often result in subjective measurements using questionnaires as a key method of data collection. In this paper we present a study of 44 participants of a collaborative augmented reality game known as TimeWarp which used both subjective and objective behavioral measures. Behavior as coded from video recordings of one scene of the game and self-reports about feelings of presence were compared. Our findings indicate that pointing behavior and verbal responses to the virtual content are correlated negatively to sense of presence. We further investigated the influence of subjectively perceived interactivity on perceived presence. We found that the interaction possibilities perceived by the participants predicted their experience of social presence with the virtual characters in the game. Furthermore, playing together with another person did not result in decreased social presence of the virtual characters. Implications for presence research are discussed.

This paper charts the distinctive challenges of designing mobile experiences for cyclists and presents two studies of mobile cycle-based experiences: one a heritage tour; the other an exploration of a city at dusk involving recording and listening to personal stories. To understand the cyclists' experiences questionnaires, interviews and observations are drawn on to derive eight lessons for designing cycle-based interaction including: cycling proficiency, physicality, impact of the environment, media and hardware design, collaboration, and safety. The conclusion is that design has to respect the distinctive nature of cycling as a mode of transport and needs to carefully interweave moments of interaction with it.

Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other multimedia sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to a player's movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game server and other players. We review recent examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as multimedia applications. We then consider the challenge of scaling pervasive games to include potentially very large numbers of players. We propose a new approach based upon a campaign model in which individuals, local groups and experts draw on a combination of pervasive games, online services and broadcasting to take part in national or even global events. We discuss the challenges that this raises for further research.

A 3D information space is a three-dimensional visualization that contains 2D visualizations and puts them in a semantic context. In this paper, we sketch how mixed reality (MR) can be exploited as a technology in order to realize better interaction in a 3D information space and, as a result, to develop new interactive visualization techniques. Here, the real space is used as a metaphor for interacting with the 3D information space.