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Orientation in public environments is a critical skill for new arrivals, yet also one that is usually only learned gradually through trial and error. This paper suggests the use of pervasive augmented reality (AR) for the design of a serious game that teaches navigational skills in a public environment. Many AR scavenger hunt games confront players with new environments by default, however they rarely focus explicitly on teaching navigational skills. We propose a concept that utilises augmented reality techniques for increased immersion and motivation, while upholding the real-world sense of presence for an easy transfer of orientation skills to everyday life. For this purpose, we implemented a first prototypical serious game in the form of an AR scavenger hunt. A preliminary evaluation regarding its usability produced promising results. As such, the prototype constitutes a first proof of concept. In future iterations, it will be further developed as an adaptive AR serious game, and evaluated in respect to its efficacy in teaching orientation and navigation skills.

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The introduction of extra dimensions is an invaluable strategy for the unification of gravity with other physical fields. Nevertheless, the matter in hand is to be eventually reduced to the actual 4D spacetime. The Kaluza-Klein theory is no exception to this well-known scheme. There are two procedures to obtain the field equations from a higher dimensional action. One can either take the variation of the effective action in that higher dimension and then reduce the resulting equations or reduce the higher dimensional action to the actual 4D and henceforward take the variations with respect to the constituent fields of the theory. Here, for the case of a quadratic curvature model with a Kaluza-Klein ansatz the field equations are obtained from the reduced action and compatibility of these two procedures is discussed in detail.

No abstract