Project IRL: Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile Augmented Reality

Abstract

We present Project IRL (In Real Life), a suite of five mobile apps we created to explore novel ways of supporting in-person social interactions with augmented reality. In recent years, the tone of public discourse surrounding digital technology has become increasingly critical, and technology's influence on the way people relate to each other has been blamed for making people feel "alone together," diverting their attention from truly engaging with one another when they interact in person. Motivated by this challenge, we focus on an under-explored design space: playful co-located interactions. We evaluated the apps through a deployment study that involved interviews and participant observations with 101 people. We synthesized the results into a series of design guidelines that focus on four themes: (1) device arrangement (e.g., are people sharing one phone, or does each person have their own?), (2) enablers (e.g., should the activity focus on an object, body part, or pet?), (3) affordances of modifying reality (i.e., features of the technology that enhance its potential to encourage various aspects of social interaction), and (4) co-located play (i.e., using technology to make in-person play engaging and inviting). We conclude by presenting our design guidelines for future work on embodied social AR.

Supporting Piggybacked Co-Located Leisure Activities via Augmented Reality

“…This reveals a need and an opportunity to design expressly for co-location. Work by Dagan et al [19] reveals several design factors that are important for facilitating co-located AR experiences, but does not explore principles for piggybacking on people's existing co-located leisure activities and does not advance guidelines for piggybacking itself. In the present work, we explore this new use case for AR to inform the design of technologies that can improve the co-located experiences that people already have.…”

“…In this work, we aim to see if we can use technology to enhance people's interactions when they are physically together with humans or pets they are close to. Augmented reality (AR) is particularly well-suited to this goal: it enables designers to easily extend people's realities in a way that considers their physical worlds [19]. AR can take into account its users, their digital environments, and their physical environments to create experiences that are embodied and contextually relevant.…”

Auggie: Encouraging Effortful Communication through Handcrafted Digital Experiences

“…First, creating and interacting with virtual objects in AR could stimulate the sense of handcraftedness, since a user is personally and physically interacting [17] with an object that feels real [24,36]. We also aim to make the handcrafted digital experience more engaging using AR due to its unique and promising potential to facilitate playfulness [11] and users' creativity [62]. In addition, the physical and spatial affordances of AR could enable a heightened sense of presence [49], which is often lacking in remote effortful communication, as found in our preliminary study.…”

Reality and Beyond: Proxemics as a Lens for Designing Handheld Collaborative Augmented Reality

“…Due to their widespread availability, handheld devices have become the dominant platform for AR applications and use cases and have been explored in domains such as education, social gaming, design, and architecture [8]. Handheld Collaborative AR (HCAR) systems allow for novel forms of co-located play [6,22,52] and can be integrated into classroom environments [27,41,47,48] to support new collaborative learning activities. They can also support new forms of collaborative design and architecture [17,26,43], and other domains such as sports [7].…”