An official website of the United States government
Sighted players gain spatial awareness within video games through sight and spatial awareness tools (SATs) such as minimaps. Visually impaired players (VIPs), however, must often rely heavily on SATs to gain spatial awareness, especially in complex environments where using rich ambient sound design alone may be insufficient. Researchers have developed many SATs for facilitating spatial awareness within VIPs. Yet this abundance disguises a gap in our understanding about how exactly these approaches assist VIPs in gaining spatial awareness and what their relative merits and limitations are. To address this, we investigate four leading approaches to facilitating spatial awareness for VIPs within a 3D video game context. Our findings uncover new insights into SATs for VIPs within video games, including that VIPs value position and orientation information the most from an SAT; that none of the approaches we investigated convey position and orientation effectively; and that VIPs highly value the ability to customize SATs.
more »
« less
VIRD: Immersive Match Video Analysis for High-Performance Badminton Coaching
Badminton is a fast-paced sport that requires a strategic combination of spatial, temporal, and technical tactics. To gain a competitive edge at high-level competitions, badminton professionals frequently analyze match videos to gain insights and develop game strategies. However, the current process for analyzing matches is time-consuming and relies heavily on manual note-taking, due to the lack of automatic data collection and appropriate visualization tools. As a result, there is a gap in effectively analyzing matches and communicating insights among badminton coaches and players. This work proposes an end-to-end immersive match analysis pipeline designed in close collaboration with badminton professionals, including Olympic and national coaches and players. We present VIRD, a VR Bird (i.e., shuttle) immersive analysis tool, that supports interactive badminton game analysis in an immersive environment based on 3D reconstructed game views of the match video. We propose a top-down analytic workflow that allows users to seamlessly move from a high-level match overview to a detailed game view of individual rallies and shots, using situated 3D visualizations and video. We collect 3D spatial and dynamic shot data and player poses with computer vision models and visualize them in VR. Through immersive visualizations, coaches can interactively analyze situated spatial data (player positions, poses, and shot trajectories) with flexible viewpoints while navigating between shots and rallies effectively with embodied interaction. We evaluated the usefulness of VIRD with Olympic and national-level coaches and players in real matches. Results show that immersive analytics supports effective badminton match analysis with reduced context-switching costs and enhances spatial understanding with a high sense of presence.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2107328
- PAR ID:
- 10435041
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
- ISSN:
- 1941-0506
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We present IMPS: Immersive Media Player System, a tightly synchronized 360º media player that leverages Android VR headsets to deliver immersive educational experiences. Designed for deployment in classrooms, IMPS allows instructors to manage synchronized playback for up to 50 headsets using a tablet interface. The system’s synchronization algorithm ensures lockstep playback across devices within 10 ms, addressing audio and video desynchronization issues of previous systems. IMPS has been successfully deployed by the Act One non-profit to deliver VR content to Title I schools in Arizona and is also used at Arizona State University for synchronized playback of 360º media in educational settings.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Video game tutorials allow players to gain mastery over game skills and mechanics. To hone players’ skills, it is beneficial from practicing in environments that promote individ- ual player skill sets. However, automatically generating environ- ments which are mechanically similar to one-another is a non- trivial problem. This paper presents a level generation method for Super Mario by stitching together pre-generated “scenes” that contain specific mechanics, using mechanic-sequences from agent playthroughs as input specifications. Given a sequence of mechanics, the proposed system uses an FI-2Pop algorithm and a corpus of scenes to perform automated level authoring. The proposed system outputs levels that can be beaten using a similar mechanical sequence to the target mechanic sequence but with a different playthrough experience. We compare the proposed system to a greedy method that selects scenes that maximize the number of matched mechanics. Unlike the greedy approach, the proposed system is able to maximize the number of matched mechanics while reducing emergent mechanics using the stitching process.more » « less
-
Although prior research has highlighted the significance of representations for mathematical learning, there is still a lack of research on how students use multimodal external representations (MERs) to solve mathematical tasks in digital game-based learning (DGBL) environments. This exploratory study was to examine the salient patterns problem solvers demonstrated using MERs when they engaged in a single-player, three-dimensional architecture game that requires the acquisition and application of math knowledge and thinking in game-based context problem solving. We recorded and systematically coded the behaviors of using MERs demonstrated by 20 university students during 1.5 hours of gameplay. We conducted both cluster and sequential analyses with a total of 2654 encoded behaviors. The study indicated that the maneuverable visual-spatial representation was most frequently used in the selected architecture game. All of the participants performed a high level of representational transformations, including both treatment and conversion transformations. However, compared to the students in the second cluster who were mostly non-game players, students in the first cluster (composed of mainly experienced video game players) displayed a higher frequency of interacting with various MERs and a more cautious and optimized reflective problem-solving process.more » « less
-
Participatory narratives are compelling, at least partly because of their ability to help players suspend disbelief in the fictional world in which they engage. Game makers have used the phrase “This is Not a Game” (TINAG) to capture the willingness of players to buy into such narratives in ways that promote productive roleplaying and authentic engagement. Although TINAG has permeated the academic and popular literature on gaming and immersive narratives for decades, there has not been a scientific grounding for the term that provides researchers support for a more rigorous study of the topic. This article makes two primary contributions. First, it provides a definition of the Perception of TINAG based on a systematic literature review of 50 articles that define or describe critical characteristics of TINAG: The Perception of TINAG is a player’s acceptance that they are embedded in and able to influence a fictional story woven into the real world. Second, the paper develops and validates a survey instrument that researchers can use to measure the Perception of TINAG and its three unique components: (1) the player accepts that they are embedded in a fictional story, (2) the player believes their actions influence the narrative, and (3) the player perceives that the story is woven into the real world. We evaluated the instrument using exploratory factor analysis using expert reviewers and game players. We include a table of the articles describing TINAG and our final scale to facilitate future research.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
