Papers by Nick Tandavanitj
An important, indeed often essential, feature of games is that they enable players to experience ... more An important, indeed often essential, feature of games is that they enable players to experience extraordinary situations beyond those that are safe or even possible in everyday life. Not only can this be entertaining, but it also provides opportunities for learning. This learning may involve acquiring and rehearsing skills in the game that may ultimately transfer to the real world. However, other forms of learning are also possible.
Orchestrating a mixed reality game 'on the ground'
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2011
An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the inte... more An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the interactive game Day of the Figurines, designing the size, shape, height and materials of two tabletop interfaces before carefully arranging them in a local setting. We also show how participants experienced this interface. We consider how the artists worked with a multi-scale notion of interactional trajectory that combined trajectories through individual displays, trajectories through a local ecology of displays, and trajectories through an entire experience. Our findings shed light on discussions within HCI concerning interaction with tangible and tabletop displays, spectator interfaces, ecologies of displays, and trajectories through cultural experiences.
Deliverable D12. 4
mrl.nott.ac.uk
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY City as Theatre (CAT) is one of five workpackages called “showcases” within IPe... more EXECUTIVE SUMMARY City as Theatre (CAT) is one of five workpackages called “showcases” within IPerG that demonstrate and study new examples of pervasive games. The CAT showcase is exploring artistled pervasive games, drawing on the talents of artists to create novel and compelling experiences that offer visions of how more mainstream games might be in the future. This has involved developing a prototype public performance called Day of the Figurines, a slow pervasive game in the form of a massivelymultiplayer ...
The European Commission, 2020
We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online play... more We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners ’ (i.e., professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities that draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of ...
Gifting in Museums: Using Multiple Time Orientations to Heighten Present-Moment Engagement
Human–Computer Interaction
HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is ofte... more HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in ter...
Gifting in Museums: Using Multiple Time Orientations to Heighten Present-Moment Engagement
Human–Computer Interaction, 2021
HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is ofte... more HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in ter...
From Sharing To Gifting: A web app for deepening engagement
Designing Hybrid Gifts
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate... more Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI resea...
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2015
We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an ... more We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend pr...
ECSCW 2011: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 24-28 September 2011, Aarhus Denmark, 2011
A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed, visitors experienced, and curators a... more A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed, visitors experienced, and curators and technicians maintained a public interactive artwork over a four year period. The work consisted of a collaborative augmented reality game that ran across eleven networked displays (screens and footpads) that were deployed along a winding ramp in a purpose-built gallery. Reflections on design meetings and documentation show how the artists responded to this architectural setting and addressed issues of personalisation, visitor flow, attracting spectators, linking real and virtual, and accessibility. Observations of visitors reveal that while their interactions broadly followed the artistsʼ design, there was far more flexible engagement than originally anticipated, especially within visiting groups, while interviews with curators and technicians reveal how the work was subsequently maintained and ultimately reconfigured. Our findings extend discussions of ʻinteractional trajectoriesʼ within CSCW, affirming the relevance of this concept to describing collaboration in cultural settings, but also suggesting how it needs to be extended to better reflect group interactions at multiple levels of scale.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
Touring location-based experiences is challenging as both content and underlying location-service... more Touring location-based experiences is challenging as both content and underlying location-services must be adapted to each new setting. A study of a touring performance called Rider Spoke as it visited three different cities reveals how professional artists developed a novel approach to these challenges in which users drove the co-evolution of content and the underlying locationservice as they explored each new city. We show how the artists iteratively developed filtering, survey, visualization and simulation tools and processes to enable them to tune the experience to the local characteristics of each city. Our study reveals how by paying attention to both content and infrastructure issues in tandem the artists were able to create a powerful user experience that has since toured to many different cities.
Where on-line meets on the streets
Proceedings of the conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '03, 2003
ABSTRACT We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants... more ABSTRACT We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants on the city streets. In the first, the players were online and professional performers were on the streets. The second reversed this relationship. Analysis of these experiences yields new insights into the nature of context. We show how context is more socially than technically constructed. We show how players exploited (and resolved conflicts between) multiple indications of context including GPS, GPS error, audio talk, ambient audio, timing, local knowledge and trust. We recommend not overly relying on GPS, extensively using audio, and extending interfaces to represent GPS error.
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '04, 2004
Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual ci... more Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.
UbiComp 2004: Ubiquitous Computing, 2004
The use of positioning systems is an important but problematic aspect of 'context aware' applicat... more The use of positioning systems is an important but problematic aspect of 'context aware' applications. Through focusing on location-based games, we introduce the approach of self-reported positioning in which players explicitly and implicitly reveal their positions by manipulating electronic maps. A study of a game that piloted this approach demonstrates that self-reported positioning can be a reliable low-tech alternative to automated systems such as GPS. We contrast the strategies used by humans to generate position updatesreporting at landmarks and junctions and ahead and behind themselves-with automated approaches, drawing out implications for how we think of positioning error and design positioning systems.
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences - DUX '07, 2007
This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user'... more This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user's environmental footprint. It discusses the design challenges, development and evaluation of the prototype game in order to identify the key strategies and mechanisms that relate to the production of pervasive systems for mass participation. Designing the user experience for such systems is particularly difficult, as the game had to educate and entertain without patronizing or preaching to the user. A prototype system was developed and trialed in order to identify and understand how users related to the experience and how the game may be further developed. We found that character-led tailored physical activities were generally found to be the most enjoyable, while players wanted more interaction with each other and more score-based content. Creating interdependent question sets and orchestrating the game arduous process. In the future a fully automated system will be key to its use.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
As part of the mobile pervasive game, Professor Tanda's 'Guess A Where' [1] there was a need to a... more As part of the mobile pervasive game, Professor Tanda's 'Guess A Where' [1] there was a need to allocate pre-authored content for the game on a daily basis to provide an enjoyable and engaging experience. To aid this allocation of content we collected and visualized context information about each player during the course of the game. The aim of these visualizations was to provide a method through which an author/orchestrator could retrospectively view a player's current total and daily context data gathered by the game. Observations made about this data could then be used to, not only allocate appropriate content but, to tailor the content to a specific player. This paper presents the data that was gathered and the visualizations created to achieve this process.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based... more Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based play. Players create digital hitch hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then drop them into their current phone cell. Players then search their current cell for hitchers, pick them up, answer their questions, carry them to new locations and drop them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers pass from player to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months shows how the seams in cellular positioning, including varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience. Building on previous discussions of designing for uncertainty and seamful design, we consider five ways of dealing with these seams: removing, hiding, managing, revealing and exploiting them. This leads us to propose the mechanism of a dynamic search focus, to explore new visualization tools for cellular data, and to reconsider the general relationship between 'virtual' and 'physical' worlds in location-based games.
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2011
Touring location-based experiences is challenging, as both content and underlying location-servic... more Touring location-based experiences is challenging, as both content and underlying location-services must be adapted to each new setting. A study of a touring performance called Rider Spoke as it visited three different cities reveals how professional artists developed a novel approach to these challenges in which users drove the co-evolution of content and the underlying location-service as they explored each new city. We show how the artists iteratively developed filtering, survey, visualization and simulation tools and processes to enable them to tune the experience to the local characteristics of each city. Our study reveals how by paying attention to both content and infrastructure issues in tandem the artists were able to create a powerful user experience that has since toured to many different cities.
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Papers by Nick Tandavanitj