Aim
The aim of the research is to study how technologies like augmented reality combined with user centered design will guide the users to experience flow.
Theory
Flow
According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.
As the challenges we face increase, we become more anxious and lose flow. Re-entering flow involves increasing our skills to match these challenges and reduce anxiety. As we increase our skill level, we become bored unless we increase the challenge to match our greater abilities.
User centered design
Design solutions achieved in a tight cooperation with the service end-users (tests, interviews etc). The research is about design patterns and finding which designs tend to create flow.
Experience design
User experience design is a subset of the broader field of experience design; the latter being defined as an approach to the design of products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the users’ experience. Experience design is therefore driven by consideration of the ‘moments’ of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create.
Based on a single or series of interactions and first-hand impressions with a product, or system, users create a rich experience that can be satisfactory, engaging, enjoyable, etc.
Augmented reality
Current augmented reality experiences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at center stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of interactions assuming a single user seeing simple arrows and tags indicating POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) augmented realities.
These social augmented experiences will allow not only mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by distributed groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syndicated to people who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit.
Augmented reality we can see as a technology for creating flow.
Location based media
Geotagged content: narratives and media that we consume while exploring augmented reality enabled applications.
Research questions
- How does experiencing flow influence us in exploring some location based media?
- Do technologies like augmented reality tend to take us into the flow?
- How does augmented reality support exploring location based media?
- Does user centered design support experiencing flow?
- What are the design elements needed to experience flow?
Experiment
Experiment to evaluate if people participating will reach flow.
For example, create a custom Wikitude layer about some places in old town and let people to find information about these places. There are 2 options to compare: 1) people finding this information via augmented reality (the Wikitude layer), 2) people finding the information using their phones browser (using twitter client, flickr, wikipedia etc). The information may vary: tweets around this location, reviews, useful information, photos etc.
Experience sampling method could be used to evaluate if people have experienced flow and then compare the results.
Literature
- Online articles: Delicious list (tagged “thesis”)
- Google Books to-read list
- Articles
Choonsung Shin, Wonwoo Lee, Youngjung Suh, Hyoseok Yoon, Youngho Lee, Woontack Woo, 2009 ”CAMAR 2.0: Future Direction of Context-Aware Mobile Augmented Reality”
Sejin Oh and Woontack Woo, 2009 ”CAMAR: Context-aware Mobile Augmented Reality in Smart Space”
Donna L. Hoffman, Thomas P. Novak, 2007 “Flow Online: Lessons Learned and Future Prospects”
Gerhard Reitmayr, Dieter Schmalstieg ”A Platform for location based Augmented Reality Applications”
Andrew Polaine, ”The Flow Principle in Interactivity”
Joel E. Fischer, 2009 “Experience-Sampling Tools: a Critical Review”
Steven Pace, 2003 “A grounded theory of the flow experiences of Web users”
Thomas P. Novak, Donna L. Hoffman, Yiu-Fai Yung 1999 “Measuring the Customer Experience in Online Environments: A Structural Modeling Approach”
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Posted on March 9, 2010
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