CAREER:Supporting Design Exploration, Prototyping and Testing of Creative Augmented Reality Experiences

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will explore early design support for creative uses of augmented reality (AR) in the arts and design. The primary goal is to advance the state of the art by enabling designers to work directly with AR as a new medium for dramatic experiences. The PI will identify and support appropriate design activities for AR experiences, create design tools that support these activities, and solve the fundamental technical problems to support the creation of these tools. The tangible manifestation of this research will be a system called DART (the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit), and the primary impact will be increased understanding of the design and creation process of experiential AR systems, which offer tremendous promise for creating in-situ educational and dramatic experiences. To these ends, the PI will focus on two design activities: rapid prototyping using informal content to promote reflective design, and experience testing using Wizard-of-Oz simulation. A primary contribution of this work will be to understand the computational abstractions necessary to support prototyping in the space between paper storyboards and fully working experiences. The PI believes that working with "computationally active" informal content in real physical spaces is the key to rapid design of experiential AR systems, and that dealing with the interactions between the physical and virtual worlds is what distinguishes AR design from other interactive system design. The PI expects the AR technologies and design tools he will create will provide the scaffolding necessary to allow both researchers and domain experts to push the limits of application design. Designers interested in any AR application domain will benefit greatly from the ability to rapidly prototype their ideas, and DART will extend Macromedia Director, the de facto standard for authoring multimedia content, to support the design, testing and deployment of AR experiences. Broader Impact. Beyond the AR community, the tools to be developed in this project will be useful to non-AR designers in any field that involves simulated or physical space, such as VR, theater production, architectural visualization, or urban planning, even if the final content will not be delivered using see-through HMDs. The PI intends to freely distribute the technology created in this project, so as to empower a broad class of designers who have been unable to pursue their interests in these new media because of the expense of equipment and the difficulty in using the technology. The research will also provide a novel educational experience to those undergraduate and graduate students (in Media Studies, Computing and other disciplines such as Architecture and Industrial Design) who will be working together in the multi-disciplinary project teams in the PI's classes and on their own research projects. The PI further intends to explore how DART might be used for teaching some introductory computing concepts to non-CS students.