Shadower: Applying Shadows to Children’s Outdoor Interaction
Yang Chen, Yuyu Lin, Lijuan Liu , Cheng Yao, Fangtian Ying
Skill: Augmented reality, Outdoor interaction design
Publication: In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC ’19 Adjunct). DOI: 10.1145/3341162.3343843
Abstract. Shadows are ubiquitous in our life. Through the phenomena of shadows, we focus on a novel way which can change people’s perspectives of observing surroundings and create a natural outdoor interaction for children in their daily life. In this paper, we present a mobile AR game that uses shadows as clues with a treasure hunting game mechanism to make a connection with children and outdoor surroundings. In the field experiment at a kindergarten, children (n=6) participated in the outdoor interaction experience with Shadower. Qualitative results indicate that the use of shadows from the outdoor environment as AR makers have the potential to expand the approach to facilitate children’s engagement through their outdoor interaction.
Keyword: Augmented reality, shadow, outdoor interaction, children.
Design System
The concept of ShadowHunter is solving the tension between increased addiction to mobile games and decreased outdoor physical exploration in children. Our main goal is to design an unobtrusive and intriguing approach that uses shadows, a natural phenomenon, as physical object markers to provide contextual information on children's real-world objects. We also seek to use this MAR to encourage children to pay attention to their living environment and explore the real world with the mobile AR application.
We endeavored to follow the prediction-observation-explanation model (proposed by White and Gunstone) in AR game design concerning outdoor exploration experience as a game mechanism.
Sketches of Shadow Association