Analyzing play experience sensitivity to input sensor noise in outdoor augmented reality smartphone games
PubDate: July 2015
Teams: University of Saskatchewan
Writers: Farjana Eishita；Kevin Stanley
Abstract
Augmented reality games overlay digital artifacts on a camera feed of the environment to create fantastic experiences in the real world. The act of overlaying digital artifacts on a real environment requires detailed information about the relative pose of the player and digital artifacts be accurately sensed and computed, which is often beyond the capacity of sensor systems deployed on commercial devices such as smartphones. Game developers are adept at creating compelling experiences from a limited or noisy palette of interactions, but have limited guidance in the case of augmented reality games. In this paper, we present a novel technique for evaluating the sensitivity of augmented reality games and game mechanics to input noise by modifying the sensor input stream of an open source operating system in a controlled manner. Any game, commercial or academic, that runs on that operating system can be systematically tested for the user experience impact of differing levels of sensor input noise. We perform such an experiment on two commercial and one academic game and determine that similar levels of input noise have very different impacts on user experience depending on the game design, input modality, and narrative. The differential impact of noise on user experience is important because it indicates that proper design decisions can be used ameliorate or mask sensor noise issues.
